Love Again

It’s all coming back … again

Love Again (2023)

3 / 5

I remember the mid 90s when “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” turned Celine Dion into a mythological figure in popular culture. Seven-plus minutes of rock-opera bombast (even the radio edit is over five), the song is so far over the top it circles the globe to come back around to the starting line. No less than Andrew Lloyd Webber (an artist whose career is itself built on over the top bombast) called this “the record of the millennium.” The song is a thunderous evocation of soaring yearning for the ultimate bliss of love beyond description, and totally unashamed of itself about it. It’s built to irresistibly touch the part of anyone that harbors (even ironically) the hope to lose themselves in the blinding light of shivering, rapturous, consuming love. Seriously. If you haven’t squeezed your eyes shut and belted out that climactic “baby, Baby, Babaaaay!”, even ironically, you have a withered soul and I am sad for you.

It should be surprising that this song has never really themed a movie, but it makes sense; it’s beyond a song now. Would you feature “Thriller” in a horror movie? The song would swamp any other story that tries to accompany it. It’s too big to partner with anything. And that’s true of Love Again, too, unfortunately. The ads tease “It’s All Coming Back” as the movie’s theme song, and it is, but only sort-of; it is never given free run to do its thing. What the movie does do, though, is lean into Dion’s status as that aforementioned mythological figure. Here she’s almost the goddess of true love, used as a plot device to bring together the romantic pair that are supposed to be the stars of the show. But even then, Dion’s presence alone is overwhelming. Even when she’s just sitting on the floor with her shoes off wistfully reminiscing about the first time her true love ever kissed her on the lips, this is her movie; Sam Heughan and Priyanka Chopra Jonas are just living in it.

The movie they’re living in is a bog-standard rom-com at the end of the day. Two people meet cute through an unusual plot contrivance, fall in love, must overcome a substantial curveball, and ultimately are carried through by the power of their emotional connection. You’ve seen it before. This is it again. But there’s comfort in that nearly Campbellian familiarity, and Dion’s nigh-Olympian presence elevates everything about it. It’s worth a stay-in date night stream.

3 stars of 5: I liked it, but don’t need to watch it again.