Josh Boone’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s “Regretting You” is a romantic drama with big emotions and plenty of both romance and drama. But too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, and in the case of “Regretting You,” the narrative buckles under the number of overblown emotional scenes and the commercial interruptions for product placements. Back in the day, this movie might have felt right at home on cable, but “Regretting You” is a throwback in more ways than one.
“Regretting You” opens on teenaged Morgan (Allison Williams), her boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) and her boyfriend Jonah (Dave Franco), a tight-knit group of friends in the late 2000s, preparing to graduate high school, hanging out, going to parties, and listening to The Killers when driving around their small town. Personality-wise, they seemed like mismatched couples, with Morgan and Jonah closer in spirit than their extrovert partners Chris and Jenny. Unfortunately, since Jonah kept his crush on Morgan a secret, she doesn’t realize his true feelings for her when she tells him she’s pregnant with Chris’ baby. Fast forward 17 years later, that baby, Clara (Mckenna Grace) is now preparing for her own college ambitions and nursing a crush on a classmate, Miller (Mason Thames), who may or may not still have a girlfriend. Morgan and Chris aged from high school sweethearts to middle aged parents and after all these years, Jonah and Jenny finally got back together and have a son. However, the picture-perfect family comes undone after a car accident reveals Chris and Jenny’s secret affairl. Morgan and Jonah are left to deal with the truth and must figure out how best to move forward for their own sake, but also Clara’s, who looked up to them both.
Some movies about infidelity are told from the perspective of the ones stepping out of the relationship for some new flame. In “Regretting You,” infidelity leads to death, and while those characters are wiped out out of the story with jarring speed, not only do their surviving loved ones have to grieve the loss of their partners but also question their entire relationships. How long has this been going on? Was any of their relationships even real? This is the double tearjerker tragedy the movie hinges on, and between the way it’s been adapted for the screen by Susan McMartin and filmed by Boone and cinematographer Tim Orr, it looks and feels cheaply melodramatic. Everything is built for maximum yelling, crashouts, and crying over glasses of wine while watching reality TV.
None of the performances from Williams, McKenna, or Franco feels particularly heartfelt, just good practice for their tear ducts. Thames at least tones down his expressions for a performance that feels less hightened and more like the character of a confused teenager trying to help his crush through a devastating time in her life. AMC Theaters feels like it should have its own supporting cast credit as it’s featured prominently enough in the film that it started to feel like sponsored content. Even when a new love story emerges, the writing and dialogue feel hollow, and the overdramatic beats didn’t land as much as they brought the house down with laughs from the audience.
After the success of last year’s “It Ends with Us,” it’s no surprise that more of Colleen Hoover’s books will be making the leap from page to screen. Hoover, following in Nicholas Sparks’s path from novelist to film producer, seems poised to corner the movie romance market with upcoming film adaptations of her books Reminders of Him and Verity are soon to follow after “Regretting You.” In a way, “Regretting You” does feel like a Sparks-style work, with outsized emotions, rain-soaked kisses, and mostly chaste depictions of sex. But if the culture is regressing back to tame Hallmark-style love stories that prize tears over complexity, brace yourself for more schmaltz to come.
