There’s no meet-cute in “Office Romance,” but the way its lovers meet is pretty cute just the same. Formidable airline CEO Jackie Cruz (Jennifer Lopez) summons her new company lawyer Daniel Blanchflower (Brett Goldstein) to her office, and he walks in to see what, in cinematic terms, we shall term the full J-Lo: She’s facing the window, bathed in an optimally angled shaft of afternoon sunlight, and turns around to greet him with a perfectly, effortlessly executed shampoo-commercial toss of her caramel-tinted mane. “Holy shit!” he says, and so do we, because, well, that’s J-Lo. Or Jackie Cruz, if you prefer, but Ol Parker’s easygoing romcom is smart enough to blur that divide: It sinks into its star power as one would into a warm bath, and if the appealingly scrappy Goldstein doesn’t match that voltage, that’s largely the point.
From the self-explanatory title downwards, nobody has overthought “Office Romance.” It mostly hits the beats you expect in the way you expect it to, and that extends to its two leads playing enjoyably to type: high-powered glamazon goddess and very ordinary British bloke, thrown together for no reason besides the fact that they’re really hot for each other. Does the chemistry between them sizzle? Yes and no. Parker’s film is surprisingly explicit where it chooses to be, but not sexually so, give or take one awkward hard-on gag: It doesn’t ask you to believe that “Helen of Troy and Mr. Bean,” in the words of its own script, would spectacularly do the nasty from the off. But you do buy that, against their own better instincts and self-estimations, they would like to, and that’s enough to keep you invested.
