|
|
IT ENDS WITH US
Director: Justin Baldoni Cast: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Isabela Ferrer, Jenny Slate, Brandon Sklenar, Alex Neustaedter, Hasan Minhaj, Amy Morton, Kevin McKidd MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:10 Release Date: 8/9/24 |
|
Review by Mark Dujsik | August 8, 2024 There's little denying the good intentions of It Ends with Us, especially since the movie has its characters vocalize them repeatedly during the third act. If the storytelling were anywhere near as sincere as that last stretch attempts to be, director/star Justin Baldoni's movie might have been on to something. Instead, the whole thing comes across as a cheesy romance that makes a misguided effort to do something far more serious by the end. This is an adaptation of Colleen Hoover's best-selling novel, which means it's probably safe to eventually say what the story is about, even though Christy Hall's screenplay is filled with plenty of distractions, contrivances, and tricks to keep that from being obvious for a long while. It starts as a typical romance, with Lily (Blake Lively) and Ryle (Baldoni) meeting cute on the roof of his Boston apartment building. She doesn't live in the building, by the way, which raises almost too many questions about how convenient it is that Lily just happens to meet this seemingly perfect guy, a wealthy neurosurgeon with some amount of charm, and not have security called on her for trespassing. It would be fine if that were the only bit of convenience here, but oh, that's just the start of a plot that's founded upon Boston being the smallest of small worlds, apparently. Lily—whose last name is Bloom and middle name is Blossom, which is laughed at by the characters in a way that's quite disingenuous, since Hoover came up with the name and Hall decides to run with it anyway—is about to open a flower shop in the city. A random woman named Allysa (Jenny Slate) shows up while Lily is cleaning up the space looking for a job. The two hit it off as friends in a matter of minutes, and Lily hires her on the spot. The charm that works so well on Lily must be genetic, because it turns out that Allysa and Ryle are siblings, and do not attempt to calculate the odds of this coincidence. Nothing happened between our protagonist and Ryle, except for some heavy flirting, because he's the kind of guy who isn't looking for commitment and she's the type of woman who wants a man to introduce her to his mother. Ryle keeps pushing to sleep with Lily, despite her insistence that they should only be friends. All of that is treated as cute, which feels especially dishonest once it's finally revealed what the story is aiming to accomplish. Before we get there, though, there's Lily's past with which to deal, by way of flashbacks that must make for some awkward get-togethers while Lily reminisces about her teenage years. The significant part of those scenes has to do with her first love, a runaway boy named Atlas (Alex Neustaedter), whose odd name apparently isn't as noteworthy as the main character's. A younger Lily (played by Isabela Ferrer) sees him in an abandoned house across the street from hers, leaves him some food, and lets him clean up in her house while her parents are away. In case meeting Ryle on a random rooftop and having his sister randomly show up in Lily's store aren't enough, guess who has opened a restaurant that Lily, Ryle, Allysa, and her husband (played by Hasan Minhaj) just happen to have dinner at one night? Well, it's an older Atlas (played by Brandon Sklenar), of course, and at this point, any calculation device one might use to determine the odds of all of this happening would, in all likelihood, spontaneously combust. The story can't just be these happenstance meetings and the start of an obvious love triangle, right? Honestly, it might have been better if the material were simply that, counting on the actors' possible charisma and potential chemistry to carry us through the completely unlikely alignment of so many introductions and reunions. Instead, the filmmakers focus on a couple of accidents in and outside Ryle's penthouse apartment that make some people, especially the protective Atlas, think Ryle might be abusing Lily. Baldoni stages these incidents to look like legitimate accidents, and it's only later that a clunky line in which Lily describes herself as an unreliable narrator retroactively makes the slightest bit of sense. The movie does eventually tackle domestic abuse head-on or, at least, as directly as cheap and manipulative material such as this can do so. Despite a few frank scenes (one between Lily and Alyssa, another between our protagonist and her mother—played by Amy Morton—about her father, and a final one between Lily and Ryle), It Ends with Us spends most of its time treating the subject as a mystery to be solved or a game to be played with the audience. Copyright © 2024 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
Buy Related Products
|
(for domestic violence, sexual content and some strong language)
