It Ends with Us
Review: I do want to be delicate with my review here. I respect any movie (or book) that tries to handle such a serious topic, which I’m sure is difficult to do respectfully. So I want to be respectful as well. I personally think it handled the topic pretty well and I want to praise Justin Baldoni’s performance as Ryle. I also want to mention both Jenny Slate & Hasan Minhaj, whose performances were comedic but they don’t over do it to where it distracts from the levity of the film. I think the realization it showed Ryle have at the end of the film and the manner in which Lily gets him to have it was also really well done, without giving him too much redemption or condoning any of his actions. Now I have a few negatives. The writing was rocky. The latter half of the movie was decently written, but the first half was not. The dialogue was fairly poor, and the example I was going to use was actually the rooftop scene, which my wife informed me was the scene written by Ryan Reynolds, so I hate to say this as a fan of him. And to double down on the Reynolds family, oh Blake Lively’s acting. It was not great. It really was not even good. I feel like I’m being a hater, but I actually hesitated to even include this because, like I said, I am really a fan of Ryan & Blake both. That being said, I feel as though I should be honest and her performance felt stale at times.
High: The filmmaking as a whole was pretty good. I know I touched on the writing, but the direction (Justin Baldoni) was very good, as was the editing (Oona Flaherty & Robb Sullivan), the cinematography (Barry Peterson), & the music (Rob Simonsen & Duncan Blinkenstaff). None of these were quite award-level good, but they are definitely noteworthy.
Low: Any readers of the book may get mad at me for this, but I think the character of Atlas was completely inconsequential at all. Brandon Sklenar was alright, and I actually quite enjoyed Alex Neustaedter who played younger Atlas, but the movie and all of it’s marketing pushed that he was this love interest, when he just wasn’t. Ryle was. He’s not a good person and they shouldn’t be together, but he was the love interest. I don’t think the ‘love triangle’ (if you want to call it that) dynamic was unnecessary. It would’ve been okay for Lily to see the pattern of her childhood that was about to be repeated and coming to the realization she should leave Ryle, without another man in the picture at all.
Rating: 7/10
