Bored with Betty

Regrettably, the cute title was the best thing about this one. Oh, it wasn’t bad. It just seemed a little pointless. Or maybe it was me not understanding the point.

The concept seemed promising. Betty as a young middle schooler is cursed by a classmate, Eleni Vrakos, for being friendly with a boy she had her eye on. The curse is that “disaster will befall you and every single one of your future boyfriends.” Laughable, but admittedly Eleni did look pretty scary and her mother supposedly ran a new agey occult-type shop. Plus there was that little gust of wind after the curse, so the viewer is led to believe there might be something to it. Whenever magic happens in a Hallmark, there is always a gust of wind. 

We are reintroduced to Betty 20 years later while breaking up with her boyfriend in a taxi because he almost stepped into traffic. She is a respected Risk Assessor and Actuary. We learn that all of Betty’s romances in the past have, indeed, ended with disaster. And she has decided to just give up on that side of her life. She has always blamed it on the long ago curse of her tween years. The thing is, it is all too vague for the viewer to really buy into Betty’s problem or empathize with her. We are never told what sort of “disasters” befell Betty and her boyfriends for the last 20 years or how many. Or was it just her boyfriends whose limbs and lives were in peril?   Or did she cut short any developing relationships out of fear of disaster, rather than actual disaster? Or is she just a flake? Or At what point did she start blaming the curse? We could have used a montage of a sampling of her past supposed love disasters to get an idea of exactly what Betty and her boyfriends had been up against. Did anybody die?

Encouraged by her mother and her best friend, Mya, Betty is tempted to try again when she meets Alex who is a handsome and nice new tenant in her building. A photojournalist, he leads a very adventurous life and goes to many dangerous places. Not an ideal choice for risk adverse Betty. The rest of the movie involves Betty wrestling with her fears for Alex if they get together, waffling indecisively and basically jerking the ever-patient and smitten Alex around. One day she goes too far by following him and his buddy on a camping trip and spying on him through binoculars. When she creates a ruckus over a raccoon she thinks is a bear,  he finally realizes she is too weird and decides to move on. Meanwhile, she buys a counter curse at a fortune teller shop for 149.99 plus tax. With hope in her heart, she wants to try again with Alex and he agrees. He is a glutton for punishment. The next thing we know, Alex is running into a burning building to rescue a trapped construction worker, and the building explodes. Of course, he is OK, and Betty believes the jinx is broken. They a plan a second date. But when he falls down the stairs, even though, again, he is OK, she breaks up with him at the hospital.

Searching for Eleni to remove the curse through half of this movie, she finally tracks her down. Nice suburban mom Eleni is totally confused when Betty basically accuses her of being the source of all of her love disasters for the past 20 years. She has no idea what she is talking about. Her mother was not a fortune-telling witch but worked in a bank! Eleni was an absolute saint during this encounter. It turns out it was not a real curse but just tween-age drama. Betty sees that all of her and her exes’ misfortunes have just been just random bad luck and not the result of a curse. Boy is her face red. She gets back with Alex again and they get married. In the last scene, she is going with him to the Amazon and playing gender-mixed rugby with him to show how cured she is. For the record, I don’t think men and women playing rugby on the same team is advisable.

 I just didn’t see the point of it all. Let fear rule your life until you find out the bad things that happen are not the result of being cursed, but just random? Seems a little specific. At one point she quotes Cormac McCarthy, “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you”. Sounds like words to live by, and Betty says she loves the quote. But she lives her life diametrically opposed to that way of thinking. And by the way, it is her friend Mya who is having disaster after disaster in planning her wedding and it is Betty who is encouraging her and not letting her give up. Continuing to blame “luck” for her past problems, rather than her choices or not seeing that accidents just happen sometimes seemed to undermine whatever message I thought that maybe this movie was trying to convey. The whole back-and-forth thing was tedious and made me very bored with Betty. I don’t think she learned a thing but might benefit from some professional counseling.