As a general rule of thumb, romantic dramas tend to barrel through an established set of tropes, trappings, and cliches that must be ticked at all costs. One of the downsides is that it ends up leaving a great deal of them feeling interchangeable and formulaic, but at least All My Life has finally convinced a sizeable audience that it’s something worth tracking down.
Per FlixPatrol, the story of a young and newly-engaged couple who see their plans for a permanent future together shattered by the would-be groom’s diagnosis with terminal liver cancer has come out of nowhere to wind up as one of the streaming service’s most popular titles, having debuted as the fifth top-viewed feature on the entire global charts.
Elevated by some stellar chemistry between leads Jessica Rothe and Harry Shum Jr., some wires must have been crossed along the way after the first draft of the screenplay made it onto the famous Black List in 2017, only for the end product to be greeted with a decidedly lukewarm Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 57 percent.
It fared exponentially worse at the box office, though, with a limited theatrical run recouping just $2 million of its $25 million production costs, and it had slipped through the cracks and into pop culture purgatory almost immediately afterwards. Mercifully, Netflix users are always on hand, with All My Life the latest unremarkable legacy title to suddenly enjoy a serious uptick in awareness completely out of the blue, and to almost everybody’s surprise.