by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $8.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mason Thames, McKenna Grace, Allison Williams, Dave Franco, Scott Eastwood, Sam Morelos
Intro:
… too maudlin to be fun, even ironically, and it’s too insistent that it’s in on the joke to be genuinely engaging; empty calorie cinema without the flavour to make it palatable.
Book adaptation trends in the 21st century are best understood in waves. The first was the magical child adventures that apparated in the wake of Harry Potter. The second, paranormal romances sired by Twilight. The third, post-apocalyptic teenage rebellion fantasies marching under the flag of The Hunger Games. The fourth, ‘sick-lit’ coming-of-age stories carrying the contagion of The Fault in Our Stars. And then there’s the fifth wave, basically repurposed fanfiction put onto screens, which began with Fifty Shades of Grey, but was ultimately codified by the likes of The Kissing Booth and After.
While this latest feature from Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone technically isn’t fanfiction, it shares a genetic lineage with that fifth wave. Adapting Colleen Hoover’s novel is After co-writer Susan McMartin, co-produced by original After writer Anna Todd’s Frayed Pages Entertainment, this multigenerational look at the effects of grief and secrecy is eyeroll-worthy in the extreme. It carries the same odour of flagrant mishandling of trauma as the last Colleen Hoover adaptation It Ends with Us (a film where the still-ongoing legal battle between the people who made it remains more interesting than the film itself), pantomimed by thinly-sketched characters who require genuine acting talent to make them bearable to even look at, much less hear them spout dialogue.
And yet, even qualified talent isn’t enough to smooth out the rough edges of this story. McKenna Grace and Mason Thames admittedly put their respective experience with precocious characters to good use, but Allison Williams and Dave Franco (somehow finding a grosser relationship story to be in this year than Together) visibly strain against the heavy-handed arrested development stitched into every ‘facet’ of their roles and subsequent relationship.
On a certain level, Regretting You seems aware of its own disposable existence, right down to showing the characters watching Real Housewives to try and highlight its own potential as ironic entertainment. Which is still valid; as bad as some of the fifth wave can get, (most of) the After series and even fellow fanfic-y productions like The Invitation still offer cultish ironic fun. Enjoyment is still enjoyment at the end of the day.
But this film tries to have it both ways. It has an okayish sense of humour (primarily through Sam Morelos’ Lexie with her Shadowramma-esque commentary in her scenes), but not only are the majority of actual jokes so corny as to resemble stubborn kernels stuck in one’s teeth, the drama is rendered entirely superfluous by the resulting lack of tonal control. It runs into the same problem as fellow late fifth wavers like Beautiful Disaster (or ‘What if Fight Club was a teenage rom-com?’), where it openly acknowledges the sub-genre’s appeal in-universe, while still maintaining that same characteristic willingness to hand-wave characters who are pretty damn unlikeable (even Thames’ Miller, the most likeable of the central four, succumbs to Hardin Scott Syndrome by the end). Self-awareness only works to a point, as non-fans of Deadpool will attest.
Regretting You… do we go with the obvious ‘it’s named for what audiences will say after watching it’ joke, or point out how once you sing the title to the tune of ‘Forgetting You’ from Manos: The Hands of Fate, it will never leave your head (you’re welcome)? At any rate, this is just pointless to sit through. It’s too maudlin to be fun, even ironically, and it’s too insistent that it’s in on its own joke to be genuinely engaging; empty calorie cinema without the flavour to make it palatable. Somebody get Chloë Grace Moretz on the horn so we can finally put an end to this fifth wave.
