Purple Hearts movie review

MOVIE TITLE: Purple Hearts

This romantic drama movie was released in Netflix and on VOD on July 29, 2022.

It’s not related to the 1984 movie with the same name.

RATING: TV-14

LENGTH: 2 hours 2 minutes

MOVIE REVIEW MOM GRADE: B

IN A NUTSHELL:

In spite of their many differences, Cassie, a struggling singer-songwriter, and Luke, a troubled Marine, agree to marry solely for military benefits. But when tragedy strikes, the line between real and pretend begins to blur.

The romantic drama was directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, and written by Kyle Jarrow and Liz W. Garcia.

THINGS I LIKED:

One of my sons is in the military, so I’m always interested in seeing how soldiers and their policies are portrayed in movies.
The first time I ever saw British actor Nicholas Galitzine was in the Amazon Prime remake of Cinderella last year. He has a great singing voice, so I was disappointed that we didn’t get to hear him sing in this movie. Congratulations to him for landing a leading role next to Uma Thurman in an upcoming Netflix series called Chambers.
This is Sofia Carson’s second Netflix movie after Feel the Beat two years ago. She’s a lovely singer in real life, and I enjoyed hearing her sing, although I couldn’t quite understand most of her words in the song because of her breathy voice. She wrote and produced the songs, as well as worked as an Executive Producer of the movie.
I used to live in beautiful Carlsbad, which is right next door to Oceanside, the beach location featured in this movie.
There are plenty of interesting topics that are covered, not just romance.

THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE:

It’s extremely predictable.
Sophia’s character, Cassie, never acted very grateful to Luke for the huge sacrifices he was making in order to provide her with (illegal) health benefits. He was risking his entire military career, yet she constantly whined and complained about everything. He was literally risking his life at war while she was self-absorbed with her singing career, hardly an equal risk. Other than her good looks and talent, I don’t see what Luke saw in her cranky personality. I didn’t really like her mean, feminist character that loved to throw her angry morality at anyone who would listen. There’s nothing wrong with a feminist. I’m all for women’s rights too, but why do so many feminists think they have to hate and put down men in order to elevate themselves? The political rants from both sides became tiresome, especially when many people love watching movies to escape from the world and all of its problems.
Language like “fake news”, “bro militia”, and “libtard” are politically charged and add to cringy dialogue.
We hear some of the songs repeated, which makes the movie longer than it needs to be. That time could have been better spent showing us other things that proved to us the leading couple actually loved each other at a deeper level.
Act 3 felt super rushed.
There are quite a few military inaccuracies.
Sadly, I didn’t feel any real chemistry between the leads. That’s terrible considering this is a romance! I watched an interview with them and they seemed to not really even like each other.

TIPS FOR PARENTS:

Talk of death
Alcohol
Drugs
Some profanity
Talk of war as soldiers are seen preparing to deploy to the Middle East. We also see the soldiers on base abroad.