Parents' Guide to Love Tactics

Love Tactics is yet another predictable take on the subject of how men and women play the cagey game of love. Mimicking such films as What Women Want, What Men Want, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and The Matchbreaker, this delivers only in its focus on two exceptionally attractive and able lead actors. Otherwise, the reliance on ugly and idiotic platitudes, biases, and stereotypes about men and women just promotes the kind of divisive notions that hold people back as they look for life partners. Both Asli and Kerem speak of finding a mate as a hunting process, calling up the violence hunters do to their prey. The man, an advertising executive, instructs his friends on selling themselves, suggesting that deception will be a large part of the campaign to find a woman. Asli, the "expert" on men, counsels her protegees that men are "insensitive, dense, dishonest, awful, disgusting, and childish." And Kerem, the man who beds women once and discards them, says love doesn't exist and that marriage is never what a man wants.

We know from the earliest moments of the movie that the two will fall in love, leaving this with little-to-no dramatic tension and a great need for the filmmakers to manufacture some, a conceit that unsurprisingly fails. Even as the movie ultimately shows Asli and Kerem falling for each other, young viewers may still think the stereotypes are the way most women and men think of each other, a questionable, if not damaging, premise at best.