“Regretting You” tries to juggle grief, infidelity and complicated mother-daughter relationships; in the end, though, it feels like a Tubi original with an A-list cast, Billboard Top 100 soundtrack and Wattpad-level writing. From clunky de-aging tactics to truly terrible romance arcs, the latest Colleen Hoover adaption falls in line with its precursor “It Ends With Us” as something more famous for who was involved than what happened on screen.
The movie opens in a flashback from 2006, where two sisters and their boyfriends are on their way to a beach party when one of the girls finds out that she is pregnant.
This scene is supposed to lay a lot of the groundwork for the adult plot — though ambitious and intelligent Morgan, played by Allison Williams, is clearly better suited for introspective Jonah, played by Dave Franco, she is dating Scott Eastwood’s character Chris, who is reckless. Morgan’s playful and fun sister Jenny, played by Willa Fitzgerald, should clearly be with Chris but is dating Jonah.
Even if you didn’t watch the spoiler-filled trailer for the movie, you can tell exactly where this entire story is heading.
One of the most distracting aspects of this viewing experience was the director’s decision to de-age the adult cast instead of creating a separate one for the flashbacks. The CGI effect ended up being entirely unflattering.
For Williams, it felt like effort wasted as she looked the exact same; for Franco, on the other hand, this decision ruined his flashback performance in its entirety. Like the villain from “House of Wax,” Franco appeared too smooth yet somehow devoid of any human features. The uncanny valley of it all took me out of the film for the meager two flashback scenes included.
We then cut to seventeen years later, when Morgan and Chris are married and raising their teenage daughter, and Jonah and Jenny are engaged with a newborn baby.
As the movie continues, we quickly fill in the blanks of the past two decades: Morgan and Chris got married as a result of her unexpected pregnancy, while Jonah had largely disappeared from all of their lives until a year before the current timeline. Upon reconnecting with Jonah, Jenny became pregnant, and they decided to get married and raise the child together. From the start, the paternity of the baby is suspicious.
Simply stated, all of the established adult relationships are pragmatic instead of romantic. And while we know we aren’t meant to root for these couples, the ones we end the movie with aren’t too swoon-worthy either.
The day after Morgan’s birthday, she and Jonah are told to come to the hospital, only to learn that their partners died after a car crash. If it wasn’t already obvious enough what is going on, don’t worry! The movie drags on the supposed plot twist for another 30 minutes before the characters finally tell us that they, too, know what’s happening: for the past two decades, Chris and Jenny have been having an affair, with her baby being a direct result of it.
In a very tortuous way, Jonah decides that he doesn’t care about the baby biologically being Chris’, and Morgan starts to come to terms with the double betrayal of her life partner and her sister.
Eventually, the two confess their love for one another and decide it should’ve been them all along…with no substantial reason why except for that they’re better suited for each other.
For Morgan’s birthday at the very beginning of this flick, she and her teenage daughter Clara work on visionboards. Where Clara adds her dream college to her board, Morgan struggles with what to hope for in the year ahead.
This prompts one of the only interesting conversations in the entire 116 minute runtime. In it, we discover that Morgan has lost her sense of identity in being a mother and housewife from a young age. Instead of pursuing her dreams of becoming an interior designer, she has filled her days by taking care of others. Clara urges her to find out what she’s passionate about over the next year.
Later, she decides to renovate their house. Though it’s an attempt at circling back to this goal, it’s a lazy one. By the end of the movie, she isn’t pursuing a career in design and hasn’t done anything outside of taking care of her household, whether it be the baby, Clara, Jonah or the literal house. It’s a terrible attempt at fleshing out women’s issues that is entirely in line with Colleen Hoover’s brand.
I don’t mean to imply that purpose can only be found in a profession; it’s a capitalistic and reductive way to look at this. This being said, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to address her identity crisis at the same time as her financial woes as a widower — two birds, one stone.
All the while, Clara, played by Mcenna Grace, is introduced as she drives and debates giving a ride to a boy she passed by.
This is our first look at Mason Thames as Miller Adams, Clara’s love interest. Clara, instead of popping a U-turn, simply reverses down this street, which is an insane choice for a plot revolving around a car crash.
Miller tells Clara to get out of the car to help him with something, and when Clara quickly caves, he explains that he is on a mission to slowly move the town limits sign to his house so his dying grandfather will be able to order pizza for delivery.
For the remainder of the movie, this plot distracted me. Does this seventeen year old really think that moving the sign will change the actual zoning of the town? Is he under the impression that they have previously accepted the order, made the pizza and drove until they reached county limits to simply call back to cancel the order?
I would be remiss to not mention that he does, in fact, have a car. He could just pick up the pizza himself. And with all of this time he’s spending moving the sign, he could probably learn to make pizza himself. It’s an entirely nonsensical ploy to make him interesting, which ultimately fails as he simply comes across as annoying.
As she helps him move the sign, she breaks one of her shoes, and upon arriving at his house, Miller invites her in so he can pay for her troubles. After bonding over their shared dreams of going to film school and joshing over the fact that he lied to his girlfriend about spending time with Clara, he puts a $20 bill in her front pocket in an effort to be seductive.
The movie tries to convince us that they’re star-crossed lovers due to his on-again-off-again relationship with his previously mentioned girlfriend, as well as Morgan not immediately welcoming him into the family after he got Clara to leave her father’s funeral mid-way through Morgan’s eulogy.
They also try to skim past Miller’s infidelity in the closing scene with a video promposal to Clara. We find out that over the course of a year, he filmed various moments that showcase his feelings for her, including during his relationship with his then-girlfriend — the same one he lied to about hanging out with Clara
“Regretting You” marketing largely relied on Mckenna Grace. An industry sweetheart and Gen Z darling, she lured tons of viewers in through TikTok, especially posts that featured her co-star and boyfriend. The relationship made the movie all the more appealing to fans, a draw that ultimately fell flat. The couple lacked the chemistry fundamental to sell the cheesy romantic drama promised in advertisements.
In the end, “Regretting You” tries its hardest to be a heartfelt meditation on grief and love, but the writers and actors lacked the depth to make the audience care about anything that happens to the characters. The only thing I regretted was taking the time out of my day to watch the newest addition to poorly conceived Colleen Hoover adaptations.
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source lsureveille.com ’
