Review | Amazon Prime movie review: Five Blind Dates – Australian romantic comedy starring Shuang Hu and a mostly Asian cast is no Crazy Rich Asians
- Shuang Hu co-writes and stars as Lia, a young woman living in Sydney who is looking for love in this Australian romcom from Amazon Prime
- With few laughs, a lack of meaningful romance, and the heavy use of genre stereotypes, Five Blind Dates fails to score on all fronts
1/5 stars
Chinese-born Shuang Hu co-writes and stars as Lia, a young Asian woman living in Sydney whose traditional tea shop is failing as badly as her love life.
Faced with the reality of attending her little sister’s wedding alone, she heeds the advice of a fortune-teller, and agrees to go on a series of blind dates in the hope of putting her future back on track.
Despite its almost entirely Asian-Australian cast, and an engaging central performance from Hu, Five Blind Dates is painfully devoid of serious laughs or genuine romance. The courtship it depicts is tired and unconvincing.
What Hu’s script, co-written by Nathan Ramos-Park, may lack in broad comedic appeal, it does make up for in keenly observed cultural specificity.
Lia is a smart and relatable young woman, who left behind her small-town roots for the bright lights of Sydney, where she used her grandmother’s inheritance to set up a Chinese teahouse that celebrates the traditions she taught Lia before she died.
Sadly, her fellow Sydneysiders seem interested only in Taiwanese bubble tea, rather than anything more authentic, and “Bobo’s Tea Time” is on the verge of closure.
Summoned back to suburban Townsville for the engagement party of her sister Alice (Tiffany Wong), Lia is told by a fortune-teller that she will meet her soulmate – and solve her business problems – if she goes on five blind dates before the wedding.
Reluctantly, Lia agrees to be set up by her sister and estranged parents (Renee Lim and the ubiquitous Tzi Ma), and proceeds to run the gauntlet of young eligible bachelors in the hope of finding her perfect match.
The premise of Five Blind Dates is simple and wields some promise, only to repeatedly fall flat because of a lack of sparky dialogue or amusing interplay between the underwritten characters.
The film is painfully beholden to genre stereotypes, from the gay best friend (Ilai Swindells) to the unassuming, wholesome and hunky childhood friend (Yoson An), who might just be Lia’s perfect match, and struggles to elevate the material.
Nobody is looking for Earth-shattering originality in a romcom; the reassuring familiarity is part of the appeal, provided love and laughter are there in abundance. Despite Hu’s valiant efforts, Five Blind Dates is weak tea indeed.
Five Blind Dates will start streaming on Amazon Prime on February 13.
