“Love Hard” is about a young woman named Natalie Bauer (Nina Dobrev) who travels to her online crush, Josh Lin’s (Jimmy O. Yang) hometown, and she finds out that she has been cat fished.

Natalie works for a company where she publishes stories, mainly about her very bad dates and relationships. Everyone that reads them loves them while she doesn’t because she just wants to have one good relationship. Natalie never catches a break from her bad dates. When she is at her date’s house, it turns out that he has a wife and kids, and they come home in the middle of them having a romantic dinner.

Natalie came across a new dating app one day and thought she would try it out. Natalie was searching for the perfect guy and found him, and swiped right which means there was a match. She found the guy very attractive, and his name was Josh Lin. Josh also found her attractive and they started talking daily and grew very close. 

I really liked the start of this movie because it was basically hinting that her relationship  was too good to be true. They did a great job on giving background information on Natalie and her past dating experiences. 

Josh lives in New York, and Natalie lives in Los Angeles so they are across the country. After they grew very close, Josh sent Natalie a text saying that she should come visit him for the holidays, and Natalie was considering it. Natalie talks to her best friend Kerry (Heather McMahan) about the situation and she says Natalie should just go for it because she has never had a good dating experience.

Natalie told her boss Lee (Matty Finochio) that she was going to fly across the country and surprise Josh. He was not in favor of it because he likes her bad dating experiences, not the good ones. Everyone that reads her stories like her bad dating experiences so she’s going to write a good love story for once. Despite Lee not liking the idea, she did it anyway and booked the flight to New York.

At this point in the movie I was liking this movie a lot so far because of the backstory and the suspense of her flying down there to meet her online crush. I was very curious what the catfish will actually look like and how she will react to it.

Natalie arrived in New York to Josh’s house where she met his parents and talked to them for a bit before Josh showed up. Turns out that it was just a catfish and didn’t look anything like the actual guy on the dating app. Natalie was super mad and talked to Josh and needed an explanation. Josh said that he needed Natalie to act like his girlfriend for the holidays, then they would break-up. Josh said if she does it he would help her get the guy that was shown in the pictures on the dating app Tag (Darren Barnet), so Natalie said that she would do it because Tag is the guy that she was attracted to.

Natalie got to meet Tag at Josh’s work and they were talking and cracking jokes, then Tag invited Natalie to go rock climbing the next day. The next day they met at the rock climbing wall, and Natalie actually bonded with Josh more than she did Tag, so that was very unexpected. However, Tag planned for them to hangout tomorrow and go skiing.

Later that same night Josh’s brother came into town.He is a show off and always tries to one up Josh. His brother announced that he and his girlfriend were having a baby, so Josh had to one up them. Josh proposed to Natalie and she was basically obligated to say yes because Josh’s parents and friends were there watching them. Natalie said yes and she was so mad at Josh for putting her through that. Josh’s parents make an engagement party without them knowing and everyone they knew was basically invited including Tag.

Tag finds out at the engagement party about what happened, and he was very mad and found out it was a whole joke. He said that she basically catfished him and there was a huge fight. Natalie went back to the airport to head to Los Angeles, but she was really missing something. She went back to Josh’s house and asked if they could be together and Josh said yes and they ended up dating. Natalie finally had a good love story for once.

This was a very good new Christmas movie that kept me entertained throughout the whole movie. I would definitely recommend this movie to watch during the holidays with your friends and family.