Sometimes, audiences have no interest in watching anything groundbreaking, demanding, or thought-provoking, with the cinematic equivalent of comfort food and a warm hug taking precedence. Fortunately for those with a taste for the formulaic, Netflix released A Tourist’s Guide to Love at exactly the right time.
Rachel Leigh Cook stars as a high-flying travel executive dealing with a breakup that came right out of the blue, which leads her to accept an undercover assignment to learn about Vietnam’s tourist industry. If you can believe it, she ends up finding both adventure and romance along the way, with a rerouted tour bus sending her on both a figurative and literal new path alongside Scott Ly’s roguishly handsome expat and tour guide.
While The Tourist’s Guide to Love doesn’t have an original bone in its body and offers nothing fans of the rom-com haven’t seen a thousand times before, surprisingly strong Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 67 and 71 percent from critics and audiences would lead you to believe that it at least does the things it was expected to do with plenty of heart, humor, and warmth.
Not only that, but it’s taken only 24 hours to overtake almost all of the competition with the exception of long-reigning champion The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die, after FlixPatrol named The Tourist’s Guide to Love as the second top-viewed feature film on Netflix’s global watch-list, wasting no time at all in securing a Top 10 position in 74 countries around the world.
