Metacritic reviews

Set It Up is a classic rom-com brought to life by a pair of wonderfully well-matched stars who seem to revel in the genre. This is cinematic comfort food, the kind we’ve been starving for.

The film delivers a central philosophy about love (you like people because of their good qualities, but you love them despite their flaws) and features plenty of earnest self-actualizing, but it’s first and foremost here to provide a funny, breezy update on a familiar rom-com formula. Unlike its lost twenty-something leads, Set It Up knows just what it wants to be

The true strength of the film lies in Zoey Deutch’s magnetic performance. It’s impossible to watch this film and not come to the conclusion that the actress (Vampire Academy) is a soon-to-be major star, as soon as she hits on a major project that makes use of her effortless humor and charisma.

It's satisfying, for the most part—a solid romantic comedy with sharp dialogue, amusing characters, a soundtrack of well-worn feel-good hits, and a few surprises up its sleeve. Its only major flaw is an inability to imagine the bosses as richly as the leads.

Katie Silberman’s script has a flip, zingy quality at its best. But like any rom-com that works, it takes at least one time-out to reach for the heart.

It’s the stars who have to work hardest to sell this kind of egg-white confection, and so they do. Having both charmed individually in previous vehicles, Deutch and Powell combine to winkingly wholesome effect, bringing just enough human self-awareness to their tidy back-and-forth banter to make it palatable.

While so many recent renditions of the rom-com have tried to upgrade the genre — usually by going the raunchy route — Set It Up feels so purposefully classic and familiar that it plays right into that nostalgic feel-good spot.

You don’t need to be well-versed in rom-coms to know that, in the process, Harper and Charlie will ultimately fall into each other’s arms, but getting there proves to be a slog courtesy of screenwriter Katie Silberman’s talky, sitcom-ready dialogue and director Claire Scanlon’s ponderously uneven pacing.

Unfortunately, while Set It Up sets up instances of subversion, it ultimately topples into a predictable mess of romantic noxiousness.

The expectation that a female-written, female-directed effort would yield something refreshingly different is scotched within the first few minutes.