“First I’m your girlfriend, then your fiancee, now I’m converting. By tomorrow we’ll have three kids.”

Justin’s rating: You’re entering… the racist zone

Justin’s review: Before online dating and apps completely changed the dating scene, the typical way for people to find true love was in implausible situations that usually involved some sort of bet. Or so romcoms remind me.

Looking for Lola makes an early run at being the most ’90s movie ever by licensing the Macarena and doing a full-on dance scene with it. This is at a club where Mike (Mark Kassen) spies dancer Lola (Ara Celi) grooving to it. The filmmakers must’ve paid a pretty penny for the song, because they keep bringing it back for too many subsequent scenes.

When I wasn’t being reminded of our national Macarena nightmare and how chunky cellphones were in 1997, I was being underwhelmed by the plight of Mike, an up-and-coming realtor who feels weirdly pressured by his parents to prove that he has a girlfriend. Naturally, he propositions this total stranger to get her carry off this facade while his folks visit.

For her part, Lola wants to get her dance career off the ground, which is probably not going to be helped by hitching her wagon to a guy who can barely emote. She also housesits for some horribly racist rich lady, which gives Mike another avenue to lie to his parents that as a young 20-something, he can afford a multi-million dollar mansion.

Oh, and there are gangsters with a bratty daughter who needs emergency tooth surgery. Mike has to pretend to do that too. It’s as out-of-nowhere as it sounds.

While I had hopes for a charming low-budget romcom to while away a Saturday evening, I was instead thrust into a slapsticky nightmare. It was pretty apparent that everyone wanted to play this as over-the-top as possible. It’s incredibly cringe, whether it be the randomly stereotypically racist lines, Lola’s kind of terrible dancing, or Mike’s unbearable parents.

Mike is an exceedingly bland main character — think “discount Sean Astin” — and he doesn’t deserve to be in the same sentence as Lola. Ara Celi might not be as good of a dancer as this film wants you to believe, but she is cute and charming and is the only person not hamming it up. It’s too bad that the pair have zero chemistry. Maybe if they had found a better partner for her.

By the way, Celi is perhaps best known in geek circles for being Inca Mummy Girl from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s second season:

What really drives me crazy here is that there are no real stakes to this setup. Mike keeps compounding lies because he’s got no spine to tell his overbearing parents the truth about his struggling career and singleness. That’s it. There’s no good reason to drag some poor girl into this stupidity and have her endanger her own job.

While there aren’t any good jokes or real romance, at least there are plenty of nasty barbs at people’s races and religions. And as much as I disliked the invertebrate Mike, the side characters are plain despicable and I wished worse movies upon them.

You could see the desire for this to be something like Fools Rush In, but Looking for Lola doesn’t have the chops to create a smooth blended romcom, at least not without putting its foot in its own mouth. I truly feel bad that Celi was wasted in it.

Intermission!

• That very “kooky” ’90s title font
• Cigars and sunglasses, it’s a club thing
• That is the biggest eyebrow ring
• MACARENA TIME
• When you’re hallucinating the Macarena in your bedroom, that’s probably not a good sign
• When there’s no good way to end a scene with a guy dancing on a coffee table, just cut it off in mid-sentence
• Taking your picture with other people’s cars is quite the pathetic move
• Gangsters like to pull out comically oversized pistols at the dentist
• Plumbing is a stable and lucrative industry. His dad is not wrong on this.
• The Addicted to Love and The Lost World: Jurassic Park posters
• How many times are they going to bring back the Macarena and make these poor extras dance to it?
• “I’m saying you dance like a duck.”
• They had full classes to teach the Macarena
• Wow could this rich lady be more stereotypically horrible
• Room-destroying wives come standard in this movie
• Hey it’s Armin Shimerman!
• $3,125 for dinner!
• They have PHONES on AIRPLANES now
• Airplanes let you carry on huge exercise equipment
• He’s got a dentist room in his house? Why?
• Wait, novocaine does not “knock people out” for three days
• Is it a stereotype that Mexican families are continually throwing parties?
• And of COURSE the songs they play are like “Tequila”
• Why does the dog have a shower cap on?
• The soundtrack is too loud and clumsily handled