THE LIFE LIST - Mark Reviews Movies

The Life List, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2025

The Life List begins with a fairly solid story about a young woman figuring out what she actually wants for her life. It's all about her dreams, some of which have fallen by the wayside over the years, and plans, which aren't exactly tangible, and happiness, which is kind of in question at the moment. All of it starts because her mother dies.

Alex (Sofia Carson) isn't exactly thinking about herself right now, and there's a case to be made that she hasn't thought about her own life and desires for a while. It's nice to see this character actually set out to better herself and determine what she wants to do with herself in the first half or so of writer/director Adam Brooks' screenplay.

At a certain point, though, that story shifts entirely to become a pretty generic and formulaic romantic comedy, in which everything about Alex's present and future revolves around which one of two men is the right one for her. The romance angle itself isn't the issue here, of course, but the sheer predictability of its course and the feeling of inevitability that, obviously, the most important part of Alex's efforts at self-fulfillment will have to be based on someone else definitely are.

There is the story, based on Lori Nelson Spielman's novel, up to that change, at least. Alex's background is that she was a teacher, until she was fired for unspecified reasons, because that has been her career ambition since she was a teenager. After losing her job, she started working for her mother Elizabeth (Connie Britton) in the marketing department of the cosmetics company the mother started from scratch. It has become quite the corporate empire, apparently, which kind of undermines the financial stakes of Alex's journey. It's pretty easy to take a year doing all sorts of self-betterment projects with the safety net of a multi-million-dollar estate right there.

Anyway, Elizabeth dies, leaving the CEO position of the company, not to Alex as everyone expected, but to one of Alex's sisters-in-law. Instead, Elizabeth's will has a stipulation for Alex to receive her inheritance. It's to complete a "life list" of goals and ambitions that Alex wrote when she was a teenager. In a video message the mother recorded before her death, Elizabeth explains that the list is still a fine roadmap for Alex to finally realize what she really wants from life.

Most of the items on that list are trivial and/or fun, like finally reading a book she failed to finish in high school, doing a stand-up routine in public, getting a tattoo, participating in a mosh pit, and other such activities. Every time she completes a task, Alex gets another DVD with a message from her late mother, offering more words of encouragement and wisdom, and there's a genuine sweetness to this relationship, mainly because Britton's performance is filled with such warmth and compassion.

The bigger goals, of course, are more to the point of the story. They include making peace with her father Samuel (José Zúñiga), becoming a great teacher, and, naturally for where this tale eventually heads, finding true love. The relationship with the father is complicated by the revelation that Samuel isn't her biological father. The teaching part is complicated by her taking a position at a local women's shelter, where one student (played by Luca Padovan) lashes out against Alex's attempts to connect. There are some intriguing setups to these, but neither the stuff with her parentage or her career, apparently, is as vital to the purpose of Alex's development and this story than the romance.

That's a shame, too, because the love triangle that forms here is the least interesting idea in the movie. One of the potential partners is Brad (Kyle Allen), the young lawyer who has been put in charge of Elizabeth's estate and keeps tabs on Alex's progress with the list. The other is Garrett (Sebastian De Souza), a random guy she meets on the subway but who turns out to be in charge of the women's shelter where Brad suggests she take the teaching position. The conveniences and coincidences of the setup don't bode well for what's to come, and sure enough, the resulting complications (Brad is dating a woman played by Maria Jung) and challenges (Garrett is so well-to-do and set in his ways that he doesn't take Alex's feelings into account) don't exactly justify the story's transformation into a romance.

Couldn't the filmmakers have allowed Alex some room to breathe and, well, figure things out for herself and on her own, without the apparent necessity that the tale of a young woman must eventually revolve around romance? The Life List starts that way and finds some promise in both its narrative and its protagonist. Once it decides that love has to be in the air, the shallow romance angle suffocates everything around it.

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