Regretting You review: Colleen Hoover’s multigenerational silliness
There’s thankfully no domestic violence in Regretting Youthe second Colleen Hoover film adaptation following last year’s leering and tone-deaf It Ends With Usbut just about every other genre cliché helps the film avoid being merely detestable and approach the sublimely ridiculous. A multigenerational love story of fairy tale logic, moralizing melodrama, and a Taylor Swift-like idolization of all things high school, Regretting You jams a season’s worth of soap opera silliness into a two-hour romance. The best that can be said about the film is that The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone, well-versed with the teen weepy, sometimes approaches the schlock with a bit of self-deflating slyness—something more attuned to the audience’s eyerolls and the cast’s barely-hidden smirks than to the serious source material.
That’s a boon for a story whose developments have a more obvious authorial hand puppetmastering them than Stranger Than Fiction. Each narrative detail and stilted line of dialogue gestures with the subtlety of an aircraft marshaller towards the parallel relationships between longtime friends Morgan (Allison Williams) and Jonah (Dave Franco), and between Morgan’s daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace) and Jonah’s student Miller (Mason Thames). These relationships—one between people who met in high school, one between teens on the cusp of graduating—have a surface-level connection and substitute proximity for resonance. But before getting to the two lightly interlocking halves of Regretting Youthe premise deserves the spotlight.
See, Morgan and Jonah aren’t unattached at the beginning of the story. Flashbacks that do nothing to de-age the film’s late-30s ensemble establish an uneasy high school quartet: Morgan, her hunky boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), and her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), who’s dating the nerdy Jonah. “Can you believe we ended up with our opposites?” asks a blatantly 40-year-old Franco, as Chris and Jenny channel their inner Steve Buscemi to play beer pong. Clearly, these two quiet, thoughtful sweeties belong with each other, not with their harder-partying counterparts. But Morgan is locked down: She’s pregnant, which means she and Chris get married so they can raise Clara. Jonah dumps Jenny and skips town soon after graduating, but rolls back through 17 years later to knock her up. So, in the present day, the high school dynamics persist: Morgan and Chris, Jonah and Jenny—the former with a 17-year-old, the latter with a newborn—neither couple seeming quite right, but only because the film insists that’s the case.
Hi! I’m Renato Lopes, an electric vehicle enthusiast and the creator of this blog dedicated to the future of clean, smart, and sustainable mobility. My mission is to share accurate information, honest reviews, and practical tips about electric cars—from new EV releases and battery innovations to charging solutions and green driving habits. Whether you’re an EV owner, a curious reader, or someone planning to make the switch, this space was made for you.
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