A Beloved Novel Becomes a Less-Loved Movie

Blake Lively's Lily Bloom finds herself in a love triangle, torn between her first love and her current partner, in It Ends With Us, the film adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel from director Justin Baldoni, who also stars as passionate yet aggressive love interest Ryle. Audiences, sure to include fans of Hoover's 2016 best-selling book, are pleased with the film, offering a 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet the critics score is 57%.

• The book was conveyed as a window into domestic violence, meant to show that it's not always black and white. In keeping with that, there's a scene in the movie "so ambiguously filmed you're not sure what actually happened," writes Moira MacDonald at the Seattle Times. But the film "doesn't really bring us inside Lily's head; it simply leaves us puzzled and horrified," adds MacDonald, who was thankful for "occasional comic relief in the form of Jenny Slate."
• As Lily's best friend and Ryle's sister, Slate is "clearly stealing the movie," writes the AP's Mark Kennedy. As an actor, Baldoni impresses, too, offering a perfect balance of "menace and seduction." But the film "veers too close to melodrama" and drags for more than two hours. It "tries to balance the realities of domestic violence inside a rom-com and a female-empowerment movie. All suffer in the process," concludes Kennedy.

• In the view of Amy Nicholson, Lively and Baldoni bring Hoover's novel "to unwieldy, heartbreaking life." "As a director, Baldoni is even more of a seducer than his own paper-perfect character," while "Lively gives a great performance as a headstrong, sensible woman who struggles to consider herself a victim" of domestic abuse, even as viewers like Nicholson feel her bruises "down to the bone," she writes at the Washington Post.
• "It's slick and eager to elide the moral messiness of the material with its lightly empowering messaging, but also competently executed with a starry performance at its center," writes Esther Zuckerman at Rolling Stone. "That recipe almost makes you nostalgic for what it's selling: The old-school, middle-of-the-road tearjerker, the Starbucks latte of movies. It's not going to blow your mind, it might taste a little burnt at times, but occasionally it does the trick."

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