Love Today Review: A Relatable Mixed Bag

Love Today is a Tamil romantic-comedy film written and directed by Pradeep Ranganathan and stars Ranganathan along with Ivana, Yogi Babu and Raveena Ravi. The movie has a runtime of 154 minutes.

Netflix’s description reads: “Before they get married, a couple must swap phones for 24 hours at the behest of the bride-to-be’s suspicious father.”

– Love Today Review Does Not Contain Spoilers –

Love Today, weirdly enough (or maybe not so weirdly), starts with a lot of product placement by OnePlus for its Nord handsets. I guess the odd focus would’ve been weirder had this movie not been about mobile phones and their impact on our lives, but it’s still pretty awkward regardless.

Anyway, Love Today starts off with a love story and the fact that parents will blame anything and everything on cell phones. However, we move away from these silly remarks soon enough and focus on our protagonists, Pradeep and Nikitha, as well as those around them in similar situations. The movie is about their relationship that gets tested and also has a healthy dose of discussion surrounding trust in relationships. On top of that, there’s a sprinkling of the dangers of the internet and technology.

Pradeep and Nikitha, by the way, are delightful together. They have great chemistry and are your typical movie couple. The relationship, situations and dialogues are cheesy as heck, but the movie knows that already, and writer-director Pradeep Ranganathan, who also plays the lead, puts forth a sweet picture that is believable and watchable.

But that’s in the first minutes of the movie when things are great, and the discussion of marriage hasn’t come up yet. And we all know that marriage is where the issues arise, and thus, in comes the typical father of the girl to throw a wrench into our young lover’s plans. Weirdly enough, that’s what helps our couple learn more about each other in an uncomfortable way.

Now, the father is your true-blue typical horror dad that has given birth to many memes and continues to give ample content. However, behind his quirky ‘jokes,’ he’s a control freak and misogynist, which the movie makes sure to tell you. It’s actually really odd the solution he comes up with for his daughter’s marriage, whose opinion seems to not matter at all when he talks to her boyfriend.

It’s also interesting how the movie conveys that truly secure relationships are those where you don’t have to go through each other’s phones. Which, I agree with – if you neurotically go through your partner’s phone, it’s better to rethink your priorities. However, Pradeep and Nikitha seemed to be all over the place, and at one point, I was glad that they got this opportunity to know these rather questionable situations in their partners’ lives. The situation is highly toxic, but the movie is edited well enough for you to laugh at the insanity happening on-screen.

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The slut-shaming, however, is what got me. I don’t understand why anyone would throw mud at others when they themselves aren’t clean and when Pradeep realises the folly of his way, it’s almost like celebrating some sort of shitty victory for the viewers. Apart from a few funny moments, Love Today made me feel like everyone around me is either a cheater or a pervert. The movie, however, nicely ends on a high and ties these moments together with a healthy dose of pure and unadulterated ‘gyan’.

At least Love Actually is self-aware of the issues that it showcases in the guise of it being funny. The social commentary is also there, although it takes a lot of time to get to the point. At 154 minutes, the movie repeats too many of its jokes and then has the audacity to throw a dustbin at a dog. Thus, after a while, you start to count the minutes after the 100th time Pradeep or Nikitha call the other to scream at each other.

It’s also weird that it doesn’t really discuss the deeper issues at play, especially the topics in the last bit. It gets a bit too heavy for its own good, and these heavy topics don’t really get the time to be picked apart. I understand that the movie really wanted to talk about the issues surrounding the internet and technology as a whole, but man, pick one topic at a time. I additionally also believe that the movie could’ve cut the melodrama a bit short and arrived at the conflict a bit earlier to make it a tighter watch.

However, even if the storyline goes a bit haywire, the music is great. The songs and background music are both to-the-point and capture the moments in the movie so well. Pradeep Ranganathan and Ivana do a great job at playing with the toxicity of relationships, and surprisingly, when they are able to get over their issues, it’s a sweet moment.

Summing Up: Love Today

Regardless of its flaws and some very heavy topics, Love Today is a good time-pass watch. The conflict comes too late and gets solved rather conveniently without going too deep into it. But hey, it’s a popcorn flick, and its first half is rather fun.

Love Today is streaming on Netflix.

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