Dakota Johnson goes from ‘Madame Web’ to meh matchmaker

Watching the new, unromantic, non-comedy “Materialists” can feel like going on a shaky first date.

There’s something… off.

Is it “Past Lives” writer-director Celine Song’s love-triangle script, which is unnatural and stilted even by the standard of rom-coms such as “Maid in Manhattan” or “Two Weeks Notice?”

Or is it star Dakota Johnson’s stainless-steel ‘tude as New York matchmaker Lucy? The always cool actress is auditioning to play the Terminator here.

If you answered “all of the above,” you’re correct.

Yet our unease is partly by design. Song isn’t so much trying to join the romantic comedy canon as she is firing a cannonball directly at it. 

“Materialists” doesn’t make you laugh or smile. Of this particular movie experience, Nicole Kidman might say, “We come to this place to ponder, analyze and wince.”

I flipped from being intrigued by the mysterious characters and tantalized by the luxury real estate to sitting there perplexed by the weird plot escalations that, while meant to drag rom-coms down to earth, drag viewers out of the film instead. On rare occasions, I was entertained.

At the start, the pieces are familiar to anybody who’s seen “The Wedding Planner” or “The Wedding Singer.” 

There’s Lucy, a love-averse young professional who’s obsessed with her job in the relationship biz. Her sole criterion for her own future husband is that he be rich. 

Then — hello! — she meets a millionaire named Harry (Pedro Pascal) at a wedding at the Lotte Palace, and he sweeps her off her feet with his confidence and metal credit cards. Uh oh. At the same fete, she also reunites with a poor but hot former flame named John (Chris Evans). 

Whoever will she pick?!

The first half goes down as easily as a glass of 1990s bubbly, but there is an undercurrent of darkness. Song throws in cutting, albeit overwritten, observations about modern courtship — a k a you better have looks and money.

Lucy adamantly insists, “It’s math,” and compares her job to working at the morgue. She finds matches for clients that “check most of our boxes”: Income, height, age, race, BMI. 

When Lucy hears about a surgery in which men get their leg bones broken to add six inches of height, she thinks it’s a fabulous idea.

Her matchmaking process is freakily clinical. It’s practically the DMV — the Department of Marriage Vows. And the exercise mirrors the app-centric way people search for significant others nowadays. How depressing.

Indeed, the men and women she works with are uniformly sad, vapid and shallow. There’s not a single person in this movie you’ll want to spend more than two minutes with.

What we assume, of course, is that Lucy will learn that love is an intangible thing — a spark, not arithmetic.

That sort of happens. While one message is that people are more than numbers, the takeaway is far from upbeat or celebratory. What the statistics actually conceal are ugly, nasty qualities in people. Mostly that they’re liars and creeps. 

Lucy herself is unpleasant-to-odious, again on purpose. The movie acknowledges that she’s awful, and we’re not meant to like her much at all. But off-putting characters must be more engaging than she is to justify the spotlight.

“Materialists” lost me halfway through, admittedly, when it became more ambitious. A traumatic turning point is realistic and jarring; however, the film can’t recover from it either.

Although I admired Song’s aims to subvert a glossy Hollywood staple, I longed for the way her “Past Lives” so simply and poignantly explored our “what if?”s. Next to that, “Materialists” is blunt and narratively messy. You can sense Song trying very hard to reach her ultimately unsatisfying and not-so-insightful end destination. 

En route, the acting is, frankly, ghoulish.

Good for Johnson for breaking free from the embarrassing comic-book confines of “Madame Web.” She still reads lines in a dreamy haze as if there is a crystal ball in front of her. And there’s not much chemistry with Pascal or Evans, both of whom are fine, if a smidge somnambulic.

Sadly, the follow-up from the director of “Past Lives” had me dreaming about her past projects.