Blake Lively first showed impressive film actor chops in a heartbreakingly effective supporting role in “The Town” (2010), and she has demonstrated movie-star charisma in films such as “Savages” (2012), “The Shallows” (2016) and “A Simple Favor” (2018). Lively is tasked with carrying the full weight of the story in “It Ends With Us” and she’s up to the challenge, but this is an uneven and turtle-paced romantic drama that feels like a missed opportunity.
Adapted from the bestselling novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover, with the co-star Justin Baldoni directing and a screenplay by Christy Hall, “It Ends with Us” starts off like a rom-com (granted, a more serious rom-com than most) and then turns into something much darker.
After attending her father’s funeral in Maine (and finding herself unable to say one good thing about him at the service), Lively’s Lilly Bloom moves to Boston to open a flower shop in an empty storefront in the Back Bay neighborhood. (For someone named Lily Blossom Bloom, the flower shop thing feels preordained.) Before Lily even gets the keys to the fixer-upper property, she has a chance encounter with Baldoni’s Ryle Kincaid when Ryle storms onto a rooftop terrace and violently knocks over a chair.
Turns out the impossibly handsome Ryle, who we later learn has a physique that would have Men’s Fitness magazine cover models seething with envy, is a pioneering neurosurgeon who just had a very rough day. He’s a bit pushy and has a kind of Christian Grey cockiness, but Lily is intrigued, to the point where she reveals a major secret about her past to this stranger. There’s an immediate spark between the two as they flirt, laugh and banter, but it ends there. Lily turns down Ryle’s offer to have sex with her.
On to the flower shop. Jenny Slate’s Alyssa comes barging through the door with a big bowl of personality that might as well come with a graphic saying, “OBLIGATORY BEST FRIEND ROLE.” She introduces herself, asks about a job, gets hired, helps Lilly turn the dilapidated space into a beautifully appointed shop and becomes Lilly’s best friend in rapid fashion. Cue the moment when it just so happens that Lilly’s brother is ... Ryle the neurosurgeon with the 12-pack abs!
With occasional flashbacks to a romance between the teenage Lily (Isabela Ferrer) and an unhoused boy named Atlas (Alex Neustaedter) she keep hidden from her volatile father, who physically and verbally abuses her mother, “It Ends with Us” touches on a number of romantic comedy tropes as Lily begins to date and fall in love with Ryle. There’s a scene featuring bowling AND karaoke, some PG-13 trysting, Allysa having a baby, Ryle proposing to Lily, a wedding.
This is when the film would end if it were a rom-com, but Ryle’s dark side begins to emerge in increasingly troublesome fashion — especially after Lily, Ryle, Alyssa and Alyssa’s husband Marshall (Hasan Minhaj) visit a trendy new restaurant that happens to be owned by ... Lily’s first love, Atlas (now played by Brandon Sklenar). Much to her horror, Lily begins to realize she’s in danger of repeating the life her mother endured.
Even with that overlong running time, “It Ends with Us” never gives much depth to any characters besides Lily. Late in the story, Lily asks her mother (played by the wonderful Amy Morton) why she never left her late father, but the response is stunningly brief and trite. It’s also bizarre that Lily knows about Ryle’s childhood trauma, but never asks him about the circumstances even after they’re married, finally learning the revealing details from Alyssa. By then, we are firmly, disappointingly, in glorified Lifetime movie territory.
The film is technically mid-level at best, from the sometimes confusing edits to the by-the-numbers camera shots to some deliberately murky cinematography that feels manipulative. Many of the location shots are so generic it’s hard to tell we’re in Boston, and while Lily is from Maine, nobody in this movie, even the characters who are presumably from Boston, sound like they’re from Boston. “It Ends with Us” handles the issue of domestic violence with admirable sensitivity and noble intentions, but with a far too long running time of 130 minutes and a plot that depends on not one, not two, but three major coincidences, it isn’t as impactful or resonant as it could have been.
