Title – It Ends with Us (2024) 

Director – Justin Baldoni (Five Feet Apart) 

Cast – Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Jenny Slate, Brandon Sklenar, Isabela Ferrer

Plot – Troubled by her upbringing, florist Lily Bloom (Lively) finds love when she least expected it in the form of neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni) but when a key part of her past life Atlas Corrigan (Sklenar) appears, a range of issues and emotions begin to upend Lily’s everyday experiences.   

“Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most”

Review by Eddie on 27/11/2024

One of the years biggest general audience and box office success stories, Justin Baldoni’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling book of the same name is a film with good intentions but one that never feels overly authentic, a feeling that is only enhanced by an awards chasing performance from its leading lady that is also the catalyst for the films off-screen problems that reared their ugly heads when the film was in post-production. 

A dream project for its director, who also wrongly injected himself into the film as co-lead alongside Lively’s Lily Bloom, playing troubled surgeon Ryle Kincaid, It Ends with Us saw the multitasking filmmaker come too loggerheads with his leading lady, who by all reports used her star power and that of her husband Ryan Reynolds to take creative powers away from Baldoni to turn her version of Hoover’s film into the one that she oddly started promoting as a girls night out/date night type feature that Us really isn’t for. 

A weighty subject matter at the heart of Us ensures that there will be many triggered or confronted by a film that takes a long hard look at domestic violence and toxic relationships and while the film has its fair share of Hallmark schmaltz (and a Taylor Swift infused soundtrack) there’s a darkness at the heart of Hoover’s story and Baldoni’s version of it that deserved a film that felt more honest and real and less like one that seemed designed entirely to give Lively a chance to further prove she’s more than Gossip Girl, a goal she has seem obsessed with meeting over the past decade to various levels of mid-tier success. 

Perhaps even more detrimental to the film than Lively’s odd performance as the complicated Bloom, full of lip-biting, lip twirling and eye wateringly eccentric outfits is the distinct lack of chemistry Lively shares with Baldoni and also the films other key to the puzzle Brandon Sklenar’s Atlas Corrigan. 

For a film like Us to really fly and become something special in both its heart-warming romances and important life lessons these romantic dalliances need to feel alive, worthy and lived in and Baldoni is never able to come to terms with these necessities as he goes about tackling Hoover’s words into this big screen version and while there’s more success to be found in flashbacks with a young Lily and Atlas as teenagers, it’s not enough to make the modern day segments spring to life.

Wherever you look there’s no escaping from the fact Us feels rather fake and lacking in sincerity, there’s no denying there’s a core message that needs to be told and shared but there’s a struggle here to tell it in an honest way free from the shackles of Hollywood productions and a leading lady who appeared hellbent on using this vehicle as a way to push her own career agenda. 

Final Say – 

Clearly a film that had a ready and waiting audience, It Ends with Us has an undeniably powerful foundation in worthwhile and weighty subject matters but most of that goodwill and good intention is lost in a film that feels irksomely born from agendas rather than love and affiliation. 

2 Onesies out of 5