Rom-Com A Tourist’s Guide to Love Is a Tourist in the Most Insulting Sense

It’s tough standing out in the romance movie crowd when there are whole networks from Hallmark Channel to Lifetime dedicated to pumping out myriad iterations of the meet-cute, the spicy enemies-to-lovers dynamic, or even the “return to your hometown and find love again” fantasy. If you want to survive amongst the din, you’ve got to make an impact. Unfortunately, Netflix’s A Tourist’s Guide to Love is more interested in carving out its space via the most cynical and calculated of genre tropes: The tax credit destination travelogue masquerading as a romance movie.   

Produced by and starring Rachael Leigh Cook, A Tourist’s Guide to Love has on the surface all of the individual pieces needed to give us something more elevated. Cook alone has been working in this genre for 25 years, going back to the still very charming She’s All That. Guiding her is lauded TV director Steven K. Tsuchida, who knows his way around all kinds of genre storytelling. And Cook is supported by usually solid comedic supporting actors Missi Pyle and Ben Feldman. That’s plenty of curated zhuzh in one movie that should generate some warm sparkles, yet instead everyone gets wasted in a bland script preoccupied with being a Fodor’s Vietnam infomercial. 

In fact, A Tourist’s Guide to Love all but tells us to lower our expectations when it spends much of the first act portraying Cook’s travel executive, Amanda Riley, as the kind of woman who likes dating an extremely beige accountant and picks a nude nail polish manicure for a special occasion. As if that’s not enough to warn us away, the script lands the death blow by having her say at one point about her whole Vietnam travel experience, “as deeply corny as it sounds…” Yeah, we get it.

In terms of a setup, Amanda is the uptight white gal who essentially gets dumped by her number-cruncher beau of five years, John (Feldman), for all the charms waiting for him in the state of Ohio. (Insert cricket sounds.) She takes that deafening hint and goes on a reinvention trip to Vietnam: For work, she’s set to secretly scout out a local travel company her boss (Pyle) is thinking of acquiring to get a foot into the global vacation hot spot. (If you didn’t know the country is a vacation mecca, this film will remind you…a lot.) Upon landing, she’s welcomed by Sinh Thach (Scott Ly), an attractive, flirty but competent tour operator who thinks she’s just a customer visiting for the first time. Ah, but in truth she’s secretly texting her boss and consistently assessing the company on her phone’s Notes app, typing zingers about the lack of water provided upon arrival. Oooh, sexy.

Amanda is introduced to her travel group, which includes lesbian moms who sigh a lot at their phone-obsessed teen, a twee Brit couple celebrating their “honeymoon” four decades after their marriage, and a young nerd vlogger. None of them are more than clichés, which is pretty much the same for Cook’s Amanda. For the first few destinations that Sinh whisks them to, she’s basically reduced to starry-eyed, “Wows,” with plenty of lingering, shy smiles in Sinh’s direction. Not to take away from Ly’s performance, which is very sweet and earnest, but Cook looks at him like his pedestrian advice on how to barter for a scarf might as well be the first translation of the Rosetta Stone. She’s supposedly a travel agent! Did the screenwriter blank on that, or just assume anyone watching this movie thinks an Amtrak trip is exotic?

Amanda’s adventures unfold in a blur of “must-see” stops around the country that get title cards with beautifully framed, travel-perfect gauzy lenses and colorful close-ups, be it market food, ancient ruins or bespoke clothing shops. And Sinh drops awkward adages on Amanda, like “tourists escape life, but travelers experience it,” which she eats up with a little crinkle in her brow like it’s profound wisdom. Full-on earnestness is the tone and tenor of Tourist’s Guide, which is a real choice when the Vietnam episodes of Somebody Feed Phil have more pep in their step. There’s no snark or anything even remotely feisty going on between Amanda and Sinh. They flirt as chastely as Mormons and kiss once at the one hour, seven minute mark. Worse, the whole film frames the Vietnamese people as if they exist to make Westerners happy when they visit. The script even goes so far as to plop the travel group at Sinh’s grandma’s village on their New Year’s celebration eve with no prior warning, so the nice locals are left to entertain these vanilla cups out of nowhere. Cringe.

If Eirene Tran Donohue’s script gave us more scenes to really get to know Amanda and Sinh as fully formed people, maybe A Tourist’s Guide to Love could have been memorable. But there’s really no chemistry, heat, or wit between Cook and Ly. Listen, there’s a reason Jane Austen’s work is still getting adapted to film and television 200 years later: She knew witty dialogue and simmering chemistry between potential lovers is timeless. If you can’t get that right in 2023, you’re failing your whole genre. That’s the case here, as Amanda and Sinh are reduced to cultural placeholders, taking a backseat to the tourist destinations that are the not-so-subtly intended stars of this whole endeavor. But at least that aspect works. If you were thinking, “Gee, what’s to see in Vietnam?” you can certainly plan a lovely itinerary just from watching A Tourist’s Guide to Love. Just don’t expect the last two words in the title to show up with equal verve or impact.

Director: Steven K. Tsuchida
Writer: Eirene Tran Donohue
Starring: Rachael Leigh Cook, Scott Ly, Missi Pyle, Ben Feldman, Nondumiso Tembe, Andrew Barth Feldman.
Release Date: April 21, 2023 (Netflix)

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, Total Film, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and The Art of Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen