On its face, Relationship Goals is a classic romcom, calibrated for viewers of a certain generation. The perennially resplendent Kelly Rowland is Leah, a boss babe morning TV producer in line to replace her retiring boss (the omnipresent Matt Walsh) as showrunner. Just as she’s poised to break the glass ceiling, the network higher-ups place her in a bake-off with Jarrett, a ringer from her romantic past played with devil charm by Method Man. The promise of one of Destiny’s Children playing the will they/won’t they game with the hunk of the Wu-Tang Clan could well prove too strong a lure to stop the scores who grew up on their music from clicking on the Prime Video thumbnail just out of nostalgic curiosity.
It’s a tractor beam made stronger by director Linda Mendoza’s extraordinarily fast pace. I mean, those 90 minutes just breeze by. Relationship Goals’s three-headed writer team – led by Michael Elliott, whose credits include Queen Latifah’s Just Wright and Beyoncé’s Carmen hip-hopera – are bracingly efficient with their paint-by-numbers setup. Leah’s besties – Treese, the tragically single makeup girl (Flamin’ Hot’s Annie Gonzalez); Brenda, the wistful morning anchor (A Black Lady Sketch Show’s Robin Thede), Roland, the omniscient assistant (Pose’s Ryan Jamaal Swain) – helpfully fast-talk through backstory points and punctuate scenes with snappy one-liners and winks at the audience. (Brenda titles her emergency engagement plan: Project Put a Ring on It.) Only Dennis Haysbert slows things down as Leah’s grieving father, but not enough to be a drag.
The film’s genre and millennial-coded winsomeness make it easy to forgive its purposeful misunderstanding of how TV news works. (Two New York City producers up for a top network job got a three-week deadline to nail a Valentine’s Day puff piece? Come on, cupid, be for real.) And a soundtrack, that whips from Victoria Monét to the Doobie Brothers and ends with a duet from the leads called Complicated, helps us forget about the truly mortal danger Leah puts Jarrett in to ensure their cliched airport denouement via an empty bomb threat. (“I’m tryna cater and Spotify you with baby makers,” Johnny Blaze spits in a word salad line that, at the very least, explicitly makes clear where listeners can stream the track.) It’s only after you’ve watched the trailer and committed to the feature that you realize that this PG-13 experience is actually meant to be a faith-based film for women who may be spending Valentine’s Day alone.
Its true star is Michael Todd, a rising star in a new generation of prosperity gospel-hawking sneaker preachers. This film takes its title from his bestselling book – which, among other things, delivers homilies about dating with intention while likening women who don’t as “chicken nuggets”.
This movie has been seen before. Fourteen years ago, Family Feud’s Steve Harvey spun his relationship manual into the blockbuster Think Like a Man franchise and was roundly criticized for smiling as he reheated old-school misogyny – or “the toxic butthole of patriarchy”, as Leah might call it. TD Jakes, the Oprah- and Diddy-approved megachurch leader has been spinning his bestselling polemics into film allegories about feminine submission for years (So it’s no surprise to find one of Jakes’s screenwriters, Cory Tynan, on this).
Todd is deeply embedded in Relationship Goals: the characters venerate him as an expert. Leah and Jarrett make him and his wife, Natalie, the principal subjects of their Valentine’s Day puff piece, which plays twice. They make a pilgrimage to Todd’s Tulsa, Oklahoma-based megachurch for Sunday service – and not necessarily to tee up Method Man for an off key rendition of Keyshia Cole’s Love in a road trip sequence, or for Rowland to wash away her sins against cinema in Tyler Perry’s Mea Culpa. Stripped of its nostalgic familiarity and romantic frustration, Relationship Goals is no better than an extended infomercial for Todd’s ministry produced by DeVon Franklin, another canny sneaker preacher who nested his pulpit in Hollywood ages ago.
Earlier this month, the comedian Druski produced a sketch where he played a sneaker preacher who drop-wires on to the pulpit in a smoke shroud rocking peacock colors and flashy chains to “impregnate everyone with the word of God”. The parody, which racked up 43m views in a day and ignited raging debates about extravagant megachurch pageantry corrupting spiritual focus, was no doubt inspired by Todd – who infamously wiped his own phlegm on the eyes of a worshipper to illustrate a parable about Jesus healing the blind. (Although Todd did say he found Druski’s sketch funny.)
Relationship Goals is no less parochial a take on marriage, presented yet again as a woman’s only path to true and lasting peace in life. If you can turn a blind eye to that message and focus on the familiar funny faces instead, the tractor-beam ride to the credits is heavenly enough.
Relationship Goals is now available on Amazon Prime
