‘It Ends with Us’ Review: A Woman’s Battle With Poor Life Choices, Daddy Issues, And A Man Made of Red Flags
I did a review of a small indie film entitled Daddio. For those who aren’t aware, I was a film starring Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson about a young woman returning home to New York City who finds herself dealing with the consequences of her poor life decisions after becoming pregnant during her affair with a married man.
At the time I said that the film was a microcosm of human depravity as the film focuses on two characters – neither one of them can be considered righteous even under the loosest of definitions. While the film wasn’t horrible, it has no grounds to lecture anyone on the subject of morality.
Fast forward a month later, and writer Christy Hall is back with yet another character study of a woman who is once again suffering the consequences of her poor life decisions. This time instead of using Dakota Johnson as the avatar of the average American woman, Hall uses Blake Lively to tell the story of what happens when you ignore a series of red flags and common sense.
In the film, Lively plays the character of Lily Bloom. Lily is a near middle-aged woman dealing with unresolved daddy issues after her father passes away, and she can’t think of one good thing to say about him. Dealing with the pain of a poor relationship with her father, she breaks into a luxury high-rise building in the city of Boston where she runs into a man named Ryle (played by Justin Baldoni), who also serves as the film’s director. Ryle is a wealthy, attractive, and single brain surgeon who runs into Lily on one fateful night and it’s a surprise to no one she is drawn to him with little to no effort. A few months later Lily decides to open up her own flower shop and hires a woman named Allysa, who happens to be the sister of Ryle. Lily and Ryle begin hooking up, and Lily thinks she has found the man of her dreams. However, in her act of lust, she manages to bypass the clear signs that Ryle has an uncontrolled anger problem.
When Lily runs into an old teenage flame of hers named Atlas, Lily begins to wonder if it’s worth it to keep pretending like there’s not a problem with Ryle. There’s a reason why modern dating in 2024 has become a dumpster fire of The Human Condition. Instead of looking for qualities that will result in long lasting and fruitful relationships, the most vapid and shallow generation in human history only looks for the superficial. Which leads to torment and unhappiness. Which then results in movies like this, that attempt to lecture the audience as if they couldn’t spot the problems right away.
Take the character of Lily for example. A woman who never had a good relationship with her father and is still looking for what she believes to be good qualities in a man, which in her estimation is face-value attractiveness. (We’re sure Ryle’s brain surgeon salary also gets considerable consideration here.) Despite the clear red flags Ryle sends up, all Lily sees is a young, attractive, and wealthy man – which is the plight of many modern women who struggle to find healthy relationships.
The character of Lily ignores every obvious red flag not because she doesn’t see them, but because she doesn’t want to. As a result, her fractured psyche recreates a series of events to make it seem like Ryle is a more stable man than he is in reality. By the time Lily wakes up and realizes that she does not need to be with this man, she’s already married and giving birth before she comes to the realization that she needs to get a divorce and raise her kid as a single mother.
Much like the film Daddio, It Ends With Us is another character study of the emotional downfall of adult women in the United States who can’t see the error of their poor life choices, yet look for another to blame when faced with the fallout of said choices.
Blake Lively’s acting career continues to falter. She has starred in one film since COVID-19 and unfortunately, that movie was 2020’s The Rhythm Section – which was another film that ranked in the worst films of that year.
It Ends With Us describes itself as a romantic drama, but the drama of this movie is the equivalent of a bad NBC soap opera, and the romantic aspect of this movie is non-existent. The message of this movie is very clear: domestic abuse ends with a mother and her child separating themselves from their abusive partner. In case you couldn’t figure it out, Lively’s character hammers this message into your brain in the most eye-rolling way imaginable. And, you have to ask yourself, what is the end game of that message?
At one point towards the end, Jenny Slate, who plays the sister of Lively’s husband, tells the pregnant character that if she gives her brother a second chance she will never speak to her again. The film oddly frames the solution to this problem by shoehorning in another attractive male character from Lily’s past, creating the illusion that for most women there will always be another option out there for them.
If the goal of this movie was to bring awareness to the issue of domestic violence, the film picks the two worst avatars to drive the story to that conclusion. So instead of telling a story in a meaningful way you end up getting a vapid and shallow vehicle that, combined with the film Daddio, raises some serious questions about the validity of Christy Hall to speak about the plights of modern relationships.
It Ends with Us is a film that thinks it is preaching to the choir, but the result is yelling in an empty room.
It Ends With Us
PROS
- A Complete Lack Of Self Awareness
- Jenny Slate
CONS
- A Rotten Script
- A Lack of Romantic Chemistry
- A Complete Lack Of Self Awareness
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