Purple Hearts misses on all accounts

For the past month one of the repeating themes I have seen on my Tiktok page were tiktoks about a new movie on Netflix — a movie called Purple Hearts.

Admittedly I’m a huge romance movie person, so I went into watching Purple Hearts open-minded. The first ten minutes or so lowered my expectations greatly.

Review

The movie opened with the main female character Cassie and it’s not hard to grasp her political beliefs quickly. She’s against guns and the military in general, a very liberal political standing woman of color. Then we meet the main male character, Luke and he’s the textbook definition of everything Cassie hates — he’s extremely pro gun and he’s in the military, with a conservative political standing as a privileged white male.

Then we meet Frankie, he’s Cassie’s best friend and he’s also in the military. Within the first half hour of the film we learn Cassie has Type 1 diabetes and can’t afford to get her insulin and pay her rent since her medical insurance won’t cover it. She then turns to Frankie with an admittedly crazy proposal. She asks Frankie to marry her for the sole purpose of the extra $2,000 a month that married members of the military get. Her purpose is to use that money to buy her insulin until she can buy it herself.

Unknowingly to Cassie, Luke was listening to their entire conversation, which progresses into Luke and Cassie having a huge fight about Cassie’s mother coming to California from Mexico illegally and how if Frankie and Cassie got married it would be insurance fraud. In the next scene we find out Luke owes a drug dealer a lot of money for stuff he was previously involved in.

After that Luke convinces Cassie to marry him for the money as he needs it too now, proving he thinks it’s okay to break the law when it benefits him. And when he’s hurt in war and was awarded a purple heart, he expects her to drop her life just because he’s hurt and his father doesn’t know they have a fake marriage, which she does and that inevitably backfires.

Due to Luke being hurt he wasn’t paying the money to the drug dealer he owed the money to. So in hopes of giving Luke a scare or something that would lead him to paying back the money, the drug dealer breaks into Cassie’s moms house which leads to Luke beating him up. After that the drug dealer runs to Cassie’s mom and threatens to tell the military that Luke and Cassie’s marriage was fake, which Cassie’s mom didn’t know. That leads to yet another fight between Cassie and Luke.

Then when the military finds out the marriage is fake, Luke yet again lies and breaks a law. He perjures himself in federal court by claiming that Cassie didn’t know anything about the extra money married military soldiers get, which could be perceived as romantic but I just find it really stupid.

Cassie then decides the day that Luke is being shipped off to jail that she should tell him that she thinks their marriage is real. I mean talk about timing. She couldn’t have stood up in court and claimed their marriage was real? 

The movie had so many subtle and not so subtle racist remarks. One scene in particular right after Cassie and Luke get married, they’re having dinner with a bunch of the soldiers that Luke is going to Iraq with when one of the soldiers makes a extremely racist comment about killing all Arabs in public. And as anyone would, Cassie reacts normally, which yet again leads to a fight between Luke and Cassie.

The movie is almost so unbelievable it’s comical.

If a man told me to sit down after his friend made a racist joke and he laughed it off, I  wouldn’t touch that man with a ten foot pole let alone go home with him that night and jump into bed with him.

In conclusion, this would have to be the absolute worst movie Tiktok has ever overhyped. This movie had the most horrible enemies to lovers trope. It was horribly done, the writer didn’t even attempt to discuss their very different political beliefs.

They were complete opposites that in real life couldn’t be left alone in a room together for a hour and exit without a scratch let alone be married and happy. It could have worked if at any point during the movie that changed but it never did. They fought like cats and dogs the entirety of the movie and all of sudden their fake marriage is suddenly real?  Not even believable in the slightest.

My review of this movie would have to be a absolute zero out of ten. While the actors were great and had amazing chemistry, the characters they played were so unlikeable it made the movie unbearable. I wouldn’t recommend this movie to my worst enemy let alone a friend or someone I remotely like.