Is The Hating Game on Hulu based on the book?

• Stream It Or Skip It: 'Meet Cute' On Peacock, A Near-Perfect Rom-Com Featuring A Time-Travel Tanning Bed

• ‘Meet Cute’ Ending Explained: Pete Davidson and Kaley Cuoco Offer a New Spin on Time-Loop Romances

• Stream It Or Skip It: 'Love In The Villa' on Netflix, A Low-Brow Rom-Com Set In Italy

• Lindsay Lohan Continues Comeback with Second Netflix Movie

Now on Hulu, The Hating Game is a modern-day romantic comedy with an ancient premise: What if, dear reader, you found yourself secretly lusting for the object of your extreme disgust? Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell headline, playing workplace rivals-turned-lovers in this adaptation of Sally Thorne’s 2016 breakthrough novel. Hopefully it blows the dust off that weary old thin-line-between-etc.-and-etc. concept and gives it a keen polishing.

THE HATING GAME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Two worlds, one office: Lucy Hutton’s (Lucy Hale) half is warm with wood fixtures and furniture, her desk cluttered and messy. Joshua Templeman’s (Austin Stowell) half is cool and steely, metal desk, clean and sleek. They work for a New York City publisher that not-so-seamlessly merged thoughtful literature with slipshod bestsellers (e.g., “ghostwritten autobiographies for brain-damaged athletes,” she snarks in post-Sex and the City voiceover). They spend their days firing invisible eye-daggers at each other and trading barbed quips. He makes fun of her Smurf figurine collection and diminutive stature; she loathes his quasi-OCD behavior and frat-douche American Psycho-isms. He plays a game where he annoys her by mimicking her every movement and gesture, so she touches up her lipstick, knowing he would never do such a thing. It’s OBVIOUS that they will defy the old cliche about what the two most attractive people in a movie always do, and never, ever f—. Never. Ever. No way! NOT GONNA DO IT.

Lucy goes home one night and lies to her mother that she’s going out with some friends, then writes some Smurfs fanfic for the online forum and somehow doesn’t have to shove seven cats off the bed before retiring for the night. She has a scorching steamdream about a handsome slab o’ flesh running his hand up her thigh and guess who it is, and no, it ain’t Channing Tatum, it’s Joshua flipping Templeman! Ughh! Bleargh! Barfffff! For work that day, she decides to wage psychological warfare by wearing a little black dress that only goes down to about here. She notices that Joshua’s eyes widen a little lies and tells him she has a date that night then walks over to the design dept. to ask slightly dorky sweetheart Danny (Damon Duanno) and gets him to meet her for drinks. Will Joshua be jelly? Then there’s a scene in the elevator where it’s just the two of them and he slams the emergency stop and before you know it he’s lifting her up against the wall and they’re mashing, mashing, mashing face.

But that doesn’t break the sexual tension, not yet. A number of scenes still have to occur in which each learns the other doesn’t live up to preconceived notions. Such as, a workplace paintball outing in which wacky crapola happens and she ends up getting sick and puking on his shirt and he takes her home and holds her hair while she upchucks and gives her little sips of water. Maybe he’s not a swipe-right-on-Tinder jackass after all? Hmm. We’ll see. Did I mention there’s a managing director position opening up at the company, and they both want it? Well, there’s your added layer of complexity in this sleeping-with-the-enemy plot, because who knows if what they’re experiencing is actual affection, or if it’s all part of the ruthless long-game workplace competition.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The hate-’em-’til-you-hump-’em concept is to rom-coms like hand-over-your-gun-and-badge scenes are to cop movies. You’ve seen it in everything from Pillow Talk to 10 Things I Hate About You, from Harry and Sally to Bridget Jones and Mr. Darcy.

Performance Worth Watching: The Lucy character is a boilerplate klutzy-but-sexy stereotype given some life thanks to Hale’s ability to keenly balance charisma with authenticity.

Memorable Dialogue: Lucy engages in a bit of editor-at-a-publishing-house workplace humor: “Put that doughnut hole away or I’m gonna shove it up your semicolon!”

Sex and Skin: Rear male sculpted gluteus, but otherwise, it’s mostly PG-13 sexytimes, and the R rating is mostly wasted on a few instances of frank eyebrow-raising dirty talk.

Our Take: Twenty years ago, a movie like The Hating Game would’ve starred someone like Reese Witherspoon alongside a generihunk (Patrick Dempsey, maybe Josh Duhamel or a pre-McConnaisance McConaughey), and come and gone with a brief blip on the cinema radar. Here and now in a world where rom-coms are less abundant, it seems almost novel to take a familiar premise – tried and true or old and wearisome? Could go either way – and give it a touch more dramatic oomph.

There’s enough plausible earnestness within Lucy and Joshua’s warm and tender moments to counteract the silliness of their you-disgust-me workplace banter. Which is to say, Hale and Stowell work better as romantic partners than as bitter rivals; a sequence in which Lucy navigates the complexities of Joshua’s fraught relationship with his family is so good, it seems lifted from a superior drama that’s disinterested in the overly familiar machinations of The Hating Game’s comedic overtures, which range from Lucy and Joshua’s Petty sniping to their eccentric coworkers, none of whom succeed in generating a laugh. Interestingly, Corbin Bernsen turns up as one of the publishing house’s co-CEOs, a sexist shitbag whose constant harassment ends up being a go-nowhere subplot.

The film tries to have it all – sincere love story, wacky comedy – and winds up giving us a moderate case of whiplash in the third act, which herky-jerks us around as if scenes were edited out to avoid a longer run time; the Joshua character sure is unpredictable, because the screenplay ultimately never sees him as anything more than a plot device who looks carved from marble by a Renaissance sculptor. (The story is told wholly from Lucy’s perspective, so the female gaze is in full force here.) Be thankful Hale and Stowell cultivate enough playful, earnest, sexy chemistry during the movie’s better moments, grounding it and keeping it from floating away in a slight breeze.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Hating Game is uneven, the rom edging out the com for better or worse. But its two leads offer enough allure to merit a watch.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Tags

• Hulu
• Romantic Comedies
• Stream It Or Skip It
• The Hating Game

Is The Hating Game on Hulu?

Is there a part 2 of The Hating Game?

Is The Hating Game a standalone?

Is The Hating Game a wattpad book?