Disclaimer: I’m a blind film critic. I don’t know how to quit you.

I get it now. Coleen Hoover is Nicholas Sparks. They stopped adapting every one of Sparks’s novels, so he decided to become Colleen Hoover. Either that, or Hoover only read one novelist, and it’s showing. I know critics have not been kind to this, but it is really hard to do that. Full disclosure, Paramount gifted me a digital copy. It did nothing to sway my opinion, but it saved me either a rental, or waiting for Paramount Plus. I don’t see me rewatching this, but I’d love for the Paramount crew to hit me up with some Running Man. Just putting that out there.

From the director of The Fault In Our Stars comes what I assume is a faithful adaptation of the source material. I did actually like the Fault In Our Stars as a fan of the book, and would say it is one of the best book-to-film adaptations ever. it really did include most of the book, and didn’t have to rewrite or cut out chunks to make things work. Here, perhaps they should have? I can’t not have spoilers. there’s no way to discuss this unless I just avoided the plot altogether. If I’m telling you what the film is, even if I try to avoid spoilers near the end, you’ll still get them.

The movie centers around a family. Morgan Grant (Allison Williams) is married to her husband (Scott Eastwood), and raising her teen daughter (Mackenna grace). She has her sister (Willa Fitzgerald) in her life, a new mom on maternity leave, who has a husband (Dave Franco) who is a teacher. Everything seems to be going great.

The daughter, Clara, finds herself smitten by the most popular boy in school, Miller (Mason Thames), a determined young man who will move city lines to get pizza delivery. She gives him a ride home, and apparently that was enough for him to break up with his girlfriend. They didn’t even kiss. She’s just that cute. She has a best friend Lexie (Sam Morales), who gives some advice, but mostly she relies on her aunt. That is, until the movie takes a hard right.

Family is fractured, devastated, and confused when two of the aforementioned adults die in a car accident, leaving their spouses picking up the pieces. it becomes fairly evident they were having an affair, and no one is ready to cope with it. Can they find their way forward? There’s more, but this is enough to get you started.

This film is nuts.There’s even more twisty stuff, and I didn’t want to go on the same journey Boone wanted me to follow on. If there was a way to minimize the adult presence here as much as possible, the story between Clara and Miller is a sweet YA romance. She’s had a crush on him, and she’s surprised to find out he did on her. He comes from bad seed, as his dad is in prison, and he’s being raised by his grandfather, who is bound and determined to smoke cigarettes as his strong character choice. Miller wants to go to film school, and Clara wants to be an actress. Will that be in the cards for them? Aside from a silly final twist in Miller’s arc that ensures his collegiate future, I enjoyed their narrative.

But then we have the rest of the film, which is like a walking nightmare. Franco, who I adore, is out of his depth here, in a film that is the emotional equivalent of a kiddie pool. He’s still expected to act depressed and devastated by the loss, yet he just hasn’t been given enough opportunities to do this kind of role. His character has to be comfortable leaving the baby with his sister-in-law (Williams), who is flirting with alcoholism as her way to cope.

Franco and Williams seem like they are in another movie, and they were miscast for it. Williams, who admittedly did a solid job of feeling like she wasn’t a parent in M3gan, is doing the same thing here. She feels like an aunt, or a big sister. There’s nothing maternal about her, and her relationship with Clara is flavorless.

this is where AI can come in handy. I know, I just said the bad words, but I was thinking, if we had an AI prompt, and I could say “Play regretting You, but remove all the scenes that don’t feature Mackenna Grace or Mason Thames”, I wonder what that would look like. That’s the most solid part of the film, and if we trimmed and focused on that, I might be willing to say this was fresh. Grace and Thames seem like young actors with the whole world ahead of them. I’m still a fan of the rest of the cast, but this is a blemish.

I did realize something. Adding insult to injury, the film kills off Eastwood and Fitzgerald, which you would think would help their career, but I think they went off to film Alarum, which is somehow far worse than this. They have more chemistry in the few seconds spent here, than in the entirety of that train wreck of a film.

The audio description is imperative, considering how much texting is in the film. I didn’t mind the track otherwise, but it really mostly just is functional.

Regretting You offers one of the most convoluted plots of the year, but lacks the emotional intelligence to do much with it. Somehow, Mackenna Grace and Mason Thames are standouts in a film weighed down by what I can assume are, well, regrets.

Rotten: Final Grade: 5.3/10