Directed By Josh Boone

Starring – Allison Williams, McKenna Grace, Dave Franco

The Plot – Based on the novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover, the film Centers on the strained relationship between young mother Morgan Grant (Williams) and her teenage daughter Clara (Grace), exacerbated by Morgan’s husband Chris’s (Scott Eastwood) tragic death, forcing them to navigate life’s challenges together.

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, teen drug and alcohol use, and brief strong adult language

Regretting You | Official Trailer (2025)- McKenna Grace, Mason Thames, Allison Williams, Dave Franco

POSITIVES

Very little effectively wielded beneficial results to my experiences with such a conflicted film, however there are some shining components that deserve even limited praise, beginning with the youthful side of this stacked ensemble, who bring with them the energy and chemistry needed to at least fool audiences into thinking they’re having a good time. This is undoubtedly McKenna Grace’s biggest step forward as an actress, in terms of emotional complexity supplanted to the design of her character, offering her no shortage of water-eyed opportunities to brandish a connective layering to the material, and with her real-life boyfriend, Mason Thames, in-tow, who himself is having an incredible year on the success of “How To Train Your Dragon” and “Black Phone 2”, the two effortlessly command the innocence and affection of first love alongside each other, appraising charismatic turns between them that initiated a breath of fresh air in the movie’s favor, each time the script deviated back to their predictable but grounded sensibilities. Beyond this, the film at least maintains an entertaining underlining, even unintentionally, for the many aspects of conveniences and contrivances buried deep within the script and characterization that are appalling, to say the least, saving its 110-minute runtime from at least being a bore, the likes of which this film never even came close towards squandering. While I found the entirety of the journey to be plagued by the kind of predictability that I effectively mustered after an overtly-revealing series of marketing trailers, the methods of which the story reaches its destination can be complimented with surreal absurdities that deserve to be experienced alongside many friends and alcoholic beverages to boost, proving in the best kinds of ways why young adult novels are still the trashiest and admittedly shameless guilty pleasure that they’ve always been.

NEGATIVES

Part of the problem with a built-in audience to a literary adaptation is that a production feels that they won’t have to try as hard to please masses, who have already eagerly sprung to buy a ticket, and while “Regretting You” will inevitably flourish positivity for those deranged enough to fall in love with the source material, it did very little in building a bridge of accessibility to my preconceived prejudices with the plot, leading to a bafflingly bad film that I’m still surprised ever saw the light of day on a silver screen. For starters, the film completely abolishes subtleties and nuance, both in the clumsiness and obviousness of its dialogue, complete with groan-worthy metaphors that it borrowed from Lifetime Television, as well as the scattered assortment of casual plot devices littered throughout the proceedings, which made this story feel like it took place anywhere other than Earth. Such an example pertains to the moments following the aforementioned tragic death of two of its main characters, in which days after the accident and the characters’ funerals, the two surviving significant others find their automobiles and shared hotel room still full of their things. This simply DOES NOT happen when people pass away, as there are limits to hotel stays that would inspire phone calls and knocks on the door to the occupying party, however the script demands these illogical instances to appraise ground-breaking realities to those unfortunately left behind, and while the bombshells land with them the impacting devastation surprise of a fart after chili, the direction treats them like they’re these earth-shattering revelations that rock the characters to their very core, stunting the curiosity factor of the audience, as they continuously wait for the movie to catch up to transparencies that they spotted as quickly as the movie’s opening set-up. This lack of effort then transpires over to problematic instances with the casting, specifically when the storytelling transitions to the adolescent pasts of these characters, where the adult ensemble are still playing their teenage representations of their characters. It’s bad enough that Williams and especially Franco are tragically miscast for their respective roles, without any semblance of palpable chemistry between them that drives their evolving romantic interests towards one another, but it’s so much more unintentionally hilarious when they’re being asked to portray 18-year-olds, especially against the crushing tide of exposition-heavy dialogue that would rather tell the audience everything about these characters, without once allowing us to experience it for ourselves. The dialogue is so mind-numbingly awful that it starts to manufacture a drinking game based on how many aspects about a particular character that it can shove into one overlong sentence, and considering these are the kinds of morally irreprehensible people, before and after the tragedy, whom you can’t believe for a single solitary second are friends, the heaviness of the intention stands out like a sore thumb in a glass glove, without any kind of artistic influence to smooth them out into feeling naturally composited within these characters. If this isn’t enough, the conflict is one of those that could easily be resolved in a ten minute conversation between its characters, but instead persists ridiculously with adults who act like their teenage counterparts, all to surmise an unearned tension of misunderstanding between them, that grows all the more nauseating with characters attempting to protect other characters who have hurt them. While the movie definitely runs a bit too long while approaching the unnecessary two hour mark for a plot that could and should be condensed into a short story, it’s so much worse when these characters are unknowingly making their situations worse by avoiding the single easiest resolution to alleviate it all, leaving the film searching for a conflict as big as the one they initiated in the opening twenty minutes of the movie, and failing miserably for an experience that thrives of conveniences and contrivances. On top of this, the film is marred in tone-deaf sentiments, specifically during the moments when it tries forcefully to be a high-staked drama, with this strangely surreal essence of comedy in the direction of Boone feeling like it lacks the maturity and patience to appraise vulnerability to these characters during their most painful times. This is especially surprising for the same director who helmed “The Fault In Our Stars”, a movie not afraid to shatter its audience to pieces with a river of meticulously manufactured tears, yet here utilizes ineffectively awkward humor to keep the spirits of its audience high at all times, in turn undercutting the momentum and empathy that could be attained from the film’s meatiest moments conveying any semblance of noticeable stakes to the kinds of people who just kind of get over it. The production itself is also paralyzingly lazy in its own lack of creative effort, featuring a complete lack of artistic influence or even momentary ambition that wastes away the possibilities of filming in such a beautiful town of surrounding scenery, and instead trading in for transparent framing devices that convey everything that the audience should already know in even one minute of interaction alongside these characters. Often times, this pertains to zeroed in shots of two characters not romantically involved depicted in a lingering showcase, sharing a space, in order to emit the internalized anguish of their obvious feelings for one another, and considering this film already does such a great job of telegraphing its biggest bombshells of surprise to the audience, this hammers it home with the subtlety of a semi-truck roaring through a nitroglycerin plant, leaving the audience feel like the proverbial fifth wheel in an automobile that we wish we could jump out of, even as the story transpires at full-speeds.

OVERALL
“Regretting You” is another formulaically predictable and creatively contrived offering for the pile of failed adapted romantic dramas, that have tested the patience of boyfriends and husbands alike for many generations. Despite an alluring youthful exploit out of the warmly exuding chemistry of real-life couple, McKenna Grace and Mason Thames, the adult side of the egregious equation leans heavily on the theatrics of soap-opera sensibilities to further its easily-relievable conflict, with detracting dialogue, tonal incoherence, and strange miscasting that make this one regret that is best left in the past

My Grade: 3.6 or F