Romantic comedies only fit into so many boxes of certain sizes, and Netflix’s A Family Affair is no different. Fortunately, originality isn’t the final dealbreaker for the genre. You can only make your characters fall in and out of love in so many ways, after all. What really counts is the chemistry between the stars; we essentially know what the outcome will be by the end, but if we don’t care why it happens, we’re ultimately wasting our time. Richard LaGravenese’s film is formulaic to a fault, but it manages to scrape by because it’s populated by genuine movie stars.

The film is a direct descendant of Notting Hill, and especially this year’s The Idea of You, where a famous person falls in love with a normie, and complications and hijinks ensue. In A Family Affair, it’s mega movie star Chris Cole (Zac Efron) who’s smitten by Brooke (Nicole Kidman), a widowed author. They meet cute after Chris’s personal assistant, and Brooke’s daughter, Zara (Joey King) quits because of his increasingly ludicrous demands. Carrie Solomon’s screenplay paints Chris with a broad brush, often leaning into our projections of Hollywood vanity, but Efron makes the most of it by making Chris the most likable himbo imaginable. Cole is essentially this world’s version of Chris Hemsworth or Evans, stuck in an endless series of franchise films but too dumb to escape from them.

Actually, nearly every character is painted a little too broadly for the film to really work, but that’s almost beside the point. Kidman and Efron are, of course, great, even if we struggle to really understand what brings them together besides their innate attractiveness. You’ve seen these characters before, in one form or another, and the film never really tries to make them memorable or stand out from their predecessors. Nor does Zara ever really feel like a real person, often ping-ponging between her desire to figure herself out, hating the idea of her mom’s romantic side, and hating her boss. There’s also a thinly sketched subplot involving a friend that could have easily been removed. King is fine enough in the role, but with A Family Affair, and the recent Kissing Booth trilogy, I worry her career will be pigeon-holed into straight-to-streaming rom-coms going forward.

The film jumps along from beat to beat without much surprise or nuance, but it somehow never feels like a chore, despite its nearly two-hour runtime. As the romance kicks in, A Family Affair loses sight of the comedic half of the equation. Solomon at least is smart enough to not force the characters into wacky hijinks or unnatural behavior. Rather than dealing with Brooke being thrust into the spotlight, the film is more concerned with the dynamics between her and Zara, and the new relationship potentially splitting them apart, which feels genuine and relatively refreshing from a character standpoint. Aside from that, A Family Affair sticks to the script and rarely deviates from its predetermined formula.

A Family Affair will be available to stream on Netflix on June 28.

OSCAR POTENTIAL:

• None.