Netflix’s Set It Up is not your aver­age mil­len­ni­al rom-com

There’s some­thing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly frus­trat­ing and sooth­ing about cook­ie-cut­ter rom-coms like Set It Up. On the one hand they fol­low an unex­cit­ing, for­mu­la­ic tem­plate which no longer holds any sur­pris­es. On the oth­er, there’s no remov­ing the Chill ele­ment of a true Net­flix ses­sion – mean­ing that a sense of famil­iar­i­ty, when it feels com­fort­able, does the job of enter­tain­ing incred­i­bly well.

Claire Scanlon’s Man­hat­tan meet-cute could have gone either way. Two over­worked (but no less fresh-faced) assis­tants hatch a plan to set up their car­toon­ish­ly tyran­ni­cal boss­es in order to enjoy their own lives again. Harp­er (Zoey Deutch) is an aspir­ing jour­nal­ist, clum­sy and cute, run­ning in cir­cles around ESPN titan Kirsten Stevens (Lucy Liu). Char­lie (Glen Pow­ell) works in a non­de­script finance role as an assis­tant to his high­ly-strung boss, Rick (Taye Dig­gs). On one of many stress­ful late shifts, Harp­er and Char­lie cross paths over a cat­a­stroph­ic din­ner order and soon a plan forms. Jok­ing about align­ing the stars that are cur­rent­ly con­trol­ling their lives, the only thing that can set the assis­tants free, it seems, is love. Some kind of love that total­ly doesn’t involve either of them, of course.

As the pair orches­trate and chap­er­one the dates and heart­felt ges­tures for their boss­es, the set-up gives way to a more organ­ic rela­tion­ship that allows both Harp­er and Char­lie to final­ly be hon­est about their own emo­tions too. Harp­er pro­cras­ti­nates from writ­ing, but is too afraid to do any­thing about it. She wants to be a writer, and she needs to show that she’s sur­vived work­ing for Kirsten with some­thing, any­thing to prove for it. When her room­mate sud­den­ly gets engaged, all signs begin to point to some kind of new set up for Harper’s own life too.

Char­lie has a less obvi­ous moti­va­tion and a deep­er anx­i­ety, resort­ing to defen­sive and self-dep­re­cat­ing jokes to mask his doubts about what he knows to be a good-look­ing but ulti­mate­ly hope­less rela­tion­ship with his mod­el girl­friend Suze (Joan Smalls). Harp­er and Char­lie mir­ror each oth­er, try­ing their best in a day-to-day that’s suf­fo­cat­ed by their jobs and those who have pow­er over them. It’s this hard­ly trag­ic but no less like­able dis­as­ter frame­work that makes room for a roman­tic Cyra­no-cum-Par­ent Trap sce­nario, as the pair so apt­ly define it themselves.

The straight­for­ward, boun­cy com­e­dy thrives because of the lead pair­ing, who last shared the screen togeth­er in Richard Linklater’s care­free, charis­mat­ic Every­body Wants Some!!. Deutch and Pow­ell are but­ter-smooth, their chem­istry believ­able from the very first snarky quips to the awk­ward patience they give each oth­er as their own romance blos­soms. Past a con­ven­tion­al­ly charm­ing plot played out by con­ven­tion­al­ly charm­ing actors, Set It Up gen­er­ous­ly pays its the­mat­ic debt to a his­to­ry of suc­cess­ful rom-coms by lay­ing bare some of its own char­ac­ters’ shortcomings.

A lot of it looks sick­en­ing­ly per­fect, but a clever nar­ra­tive cinched with an ​“and yet” sig­na­ture (inspired by an engage­ment speech halfway through the film) man­ages to cel­e­brate the whole­some and some­how wise core: there aren’t many sur­pris­es, the prob­lems that Harp­er and Char­lie face don’t have incred­i­bly high stakes, and their greater scheme isn’t always so cap­ti­vat­ing – and yet, it’s dif­fi­cult to resist a lov­ing smile by the end of it.

The film fol­lows a well-trod­den path – Scan­lon points to ​’30s and ​’40s clas­sics like Bring­ing Up Baby and His Girl Fri­day as hope­ful ances­tors – but man­ages to feel fresh in its depic­tion of the work­place and ardu­ous world of dat­ing; allow­ing the lazy, vain and fick­le to exist with their flaws, with­out being defined by them alone. No one is real­ly evil or tru­ly per­fect, and in Set It Up every­one gets what they deserve. For an audi­ence trust­ing this film with the fate of a 105-minute win­dow of pro­cras­ti­na­tion, relax­ation or what­ev­er oth­er void Net­flix Orig­i­nal offer­ings must now strive to fill, thank­ful­ly it feels like there’s a reward for them too.