Stream It Or Skip It?

It’s no surprise that It Ends with Us (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) was a smash hit: It stars Blake Lively, who’s Taylor Swift-adjacent enough to be considered a superstar these days. It’s based on a 2016 romance novel by BookTok superstar Colleen Hoover that was a bestseller in 2023 (alongside its sequel, It Starts with Us); in 2022, her books, notably loaded with unintentionally hilarious prose, outsold the Bible itself. And it helps that Lively and her hubs, Deadpool and Wolverine star Ryan Reynolds, shared the top of the box office charts for a while, landing both films plenty of extra headlines (feels like an opportunity for another Barbenheimer phenomenon was missed – it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but it coulda been It Endpools with Wolverinus). I’ve always contended that Lively is an underrated actor with a distinctly bittersweet presence, but is it enough to lift this flimsy fic-lit adaptation above the many movies based on work by similarly shitty writers like Stephanie Meyer, EL James and Nicholas Sparks?

The Gist: Her name is Lily Blossom Bloom (Lively), and for that, her parents might need to be flogged. (Or at least the real-life novelist who came up with it.) Said parents were a complication beyond that – her father, the mayor of the fictional burg of Plethora, Maine, routinely beat up her mother Jenny (Amy Morton), who stayed with the guy until he died. And now, Lily steps to the podium to eulogize her father with a list of things she loved about him most. Her notes are blank. She walks out and returns to Boston and heads up to the roof of a building with a gorgeous view of the skyline so she can grieve. And just as she’s Contemplating Things, a handsome and chiseled man bursts through the door and curses and kicks a chair. We seem to be atop Bad Day Towers.

But this guy. He’s Ryle Kincaid a neurosurgeon, who says things like, “I’m a ripped neurosurgeon,” possibly because he’s played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni. Yes. This is utterly ridiculous, but at least the dialogue acknowledges its own ridiculousness, right? Right? Right? Cough. Sure. Lily and Ryle share “naked truths” about how she’s mourning her father and how he couldn’t save a kid on the operating table. As extremely attractive people in movies inevitably do, they flirt. Then he says something that would get a Hallmark copywriter demoted to the blank-card division: “I want to have sex with you.” He’s not at all ashamed to admit to being a lust guy, not a love guy. How she doesn’t immediately rip off her clothes and let him ravage her like a lovestruck waif, I don’t know. But she resists, and he gets a call for an emergency surgery to go, um, surgure, so that’s that, and she gets about opening up her new flower shop. Yes. Lily Bloom’s Flower Shop. Because Lily Blossom Bloom’s Flower Shop would be overkill.

Lily’s cleaning up the cutest filthy retail space in all of greater Boston when Allysa (Jenny Slate) wanders in, asking for a job. They hit it off and become besties, and now we have some Slate comic relief to balance Lively’s lovely melancholy. But guess who just so happens to be Allysa’s brother? Ryle, of course. DESTINY IS AFOOT. Or is it just the screenwriter gods? And so Ryle and Lily get on with dating and sexing each other. Meanwhile, we get flashbacks to Lily as a teenager (Isabela Ferrer, a startling dead-ringer for Lively), who despaired at her father’s cruelty and fell in love with and lost her virginity to a homeless classmate, Atlas (Alex Neustaedter), who ran away from his troubled home life to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Destiny afoots itself even further when Lily goes out to dinner and who waits on her but the adult Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), who owns the restaurant and that crossover-country-singer haircut.

Back in the present day, Ryle curbs his caddishness long enough to fall really in serious and true love with Lily, and she with him. How serious is he? “Serious as an aneurysm,” says the neurosurgeon. But about here is when I have to curb the snark and get serious myself, because there’s an incident in which Ryle seems to accidentally smack Lily in the face, but how much of an accident is it, really? Then there’s an incident in which Ryle and Lily eat out at Atlas’ restaurant and some lids get ripped off: Atlas puts two and two together and accuses Ryle of beating on Lily, and then Ryle realizes Atlas is Lily’s long-lost past love. Cue the fisticuffs – and the official love triangle. Has Ryle’s true nature begun to emerge? And is there lingering affection between Lily and the sincere and forthright Atlas? The plot, as they say, thicks.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Where similar romantic melodramas like Nicholas Sparks adaptations (Dear John, The Last Song, A Walk to Remember, etc.) and Remember Me are clunk city, Lively is a boon to It Ends with Us. She works to elevate mediocre material like she did with The Age of Adaline.

Performance Worth Watching: That said, even Lively struggles to make this hamfisted stuff 100 percent palatable. Her wry smile, heartburstingly sad eyes and airy-but-never-insubstantial presence work overtime in an attempt to make an uncomplicated character a little more beefy. You can’t help but appreciate the effort.

Memorable Dialogue: Was this lifted straight from Hoover’s wretched prose?

Lily, looking out at the Boston skyline: You have a really nice view.

Ryle, looking at Lily: I do.

Sex and Skin: Lingerie’d Lively, shirtless Baldoni, some medium-steamy sex sessions that don’t really test the film’s PG-13 rating.

Our Take: For its first half, It Ends with Us works as a gentle romance about a woman leading her life with quiet confidence while wrestling with past trauma, and it’s charming if you choose to give Ryle and his red flags the benefit of the doubt. The second half, however, is significantly more soapy, its boiled-over melodrama lurching awkwardly away from the subtler material preceding it. Lively is the leavening agent of this story, and she works hard to sell sell sell it, which sounds awkward on paper, but is significantly less so thanks to her presence, which fills the screen with warmth. There’s no debating Lily as a sympathetic protagonist, Lively transcending the screenplay’s slapdash rendering of the character. Think of it like song lyrics that are corny when read, but come alive when sung with emotion.

Yet it may be difficult to come to terms with the film’s miscalculated blend of deep silliness and deep seriousness: A series of hackneyed only-in-the-movies kismetic coincidences lead to a set of circumstances that flirt with The Burning Bed-style histrionics, leaving us to imagine the extreme whiplash we’d feel without Lively’s tone-setting work. That said, Baldoni and Lively (who reportedly clashed during filming) execute the more harrowing dramatic scenes with enough conviction to respect the seriousness of the subject matter, and the film’s depiction of its domestic abuser is knotty and complicated instead of morally simplistic. Whether you can deal with this rocky, uneven dramatic terrain is the question. 

Our Call:  It Ends with Us is a mess, but a fairly watchable one. STREAM IT to appreciate Lively’s efforts.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.