Stream It or Skip It: ‘Make Me a Match’ on Hallmark Pairs Eva Bourne and Rushi Kota in App-Based Romance

Make Me a Match brings the traditions of Indian matchmaking into the Hallmark canon. The multicultural movie stars Eva Bourne as a dating app exec who decides to factor the skills of a successful matchmaker (Rekha Sharma) into her algorithm. Little does she know that the man she’s been waiting for might be even closer than a click away. He might be standing right in front of her, because he might be the matchmaker’s son (Rushi Kota). So — is Make Me a Match worth messaging or should you just swipe left?

MAKE ME A MATCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Eva Bourne (When Calls the Heart) stars as Vivi, a rising star at the tech company behind Data Mate, an algorithm forward dating app that just hit 20 million users. But when Vivi learns that Data Mate makes money but rarely makes a couple that lasts, she sets out to reconfigure the algorithm to find true love.

Enter: TV matchmaker Raina (Yellowjackets‘ Rekha Sharma), whose traditional approach to matchmaking has a 95% success rate. Vivi recruits Raina to Data Mate’s cause, and Raina brings along her business partner — her hot son Bhumesh, nicknamed “Boom” (Never Have I Ever’s Rushi Kota). Raina immediately clocks Vivi as the ideal test case to see if her tenets are a match for the app, which means that Boom will have to work closely with Vivi to set her up on dates with other guys. What could go wrong? On top of all that, both Vivi and Boom have personal roadblocks that they’ll need to navigate around before they can let another person into their hearts. Raina’s got her work cut out for her!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Forget movie, you’ll want to check this movie out if you’ve even binged any of Indian Matchmaking’s three seasons on Netflix.

Performance Worth Watching: Rekha Sharma absolutely owns the role of Raina, completely disappearing into the character. She’s playing a character at least a dozen years older than she actually is, and she pulls it off with so much warmth, wit, and wisdom. She gets so many of the best lines, too!

Memorable Dialogue: After looking over the biodata that Type-A overachiever Vivi put together and seeing that she included a question about what she would take with her to the moon, Raina leans back and asks Boom, “Does she think she’s an astronaut or Elon Musk?”

Our Take: Over the past couple years, a lot of fuss has been made over Hallmark’s increasing efforts to diversify their offerings. With the network’s acknowledgement that not everyone who falls in love is white, Christian, or straight, Hallmark has attracted new viewers as well as detractors, some of whom maybe started a whole network without really thinking things through. Diversity is a whole thing mostly because people outside of Hallmark have made it a whole thing. If you look at what Hallmark’s actually doing with movies like Make Me a Match, though, their motives come through clearly: they’re just telling stories.

I think it’s probably a conservative estimate to say that Hallmark airs 100 original movies a year across its networks. Therefore, there is more than enough screentime to go around and there has been for as long as the network(s) have been turning out original content. It’s just that now it seems like Hallmark has no limits on the kinds of stories they tell, just so long as they are about love or dead bodies (hi, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries!). That’s likely led to Make Me a Match being made, and y’know, I’m grateful for it.

There’s an authenticity and genuineness to Make Me a Match’s script that draws you in. There are big, broad comedy moments in the beginning, many coming from Sean Yves Lessard’s suited and clueless tech-bro CEO. Those give way to traditional Hallmark-iness, with the meet cute and Vivi’s cheerleader BFF Nella (Rahat Saini). And all of that adherence to the good ol’ Hallmark formula in the first half makes way for something a lot more sincere, earnest, and frankly unexpected in the back half. Who says a Hallmark movie can’t have something kinda deep to say about self-love and finding love? Make Me a Match asks some hard questions of its leads and ultimately has something insightful to say about the state of modern, app-based dating. I particularly liked the way that Make Me a Match avoids a lot of fish-out-of-water shenanigans with Vivi and never sacrifices the dignity of another culture for an easy joke.

That’s why Make Me a Match feels like the perfect example of what Hallmark’s doing by intentionally opening up the gates and letting everybody in. We’re still getting fun romances and the guaranteed chuckle and/or tear, and now these stories get to incorporate new traditions, new points of view, new writers, new actors, etc. And the ultimate result? It still feels like a Hallmark movie. How can you argue with that?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Make Me a Match has a lot to offer for both the head and the heart.