Critics label It Ends With Us 'serviceable' but praise Blake Lively

Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us has been adapted for the big screen, and while her CoHort of fans are excited to see it come to life they might want to hold their breath after seeing the critic response.

The movie centres on Lily Bloom (Blake Lively), a woman with a dream of opening a flower shop who meets and falls in love with Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who also directs). As their relationship develops it begins to turn sour with Ryle becoming increasingly abusive, even more so when Lily reconnects with her childhood sweetheart Atlas (Brandon Sklenar).

Hoover's novel became a BookTok sensation during the Covid pandemic, so a lot of fans have their hopes up for the first big screen production. Critics, however, describe the film as simply "serviceable".

The Independent's Clarisse Loughrey reflected on how it "feels a little queasy" that the film's depiction of domestic abuse is "primarily here as a dramatic device – a way to pull its protagonist away from one man and towards another."

While she admits the film is "capable of poignancy" the problem with it is that it is "entirely ill-equipped to square such sensitive material up against scenes of diamanté boots being sensually rolled down". This ultimately makes its "good intentions feel misplaced".

Read more: It Ends With Us is a BookTok sensation, so why is the film controversial?

The Hollywood Reporter's Lovia Gyarkye called the film a "serviceable adaptation", arguing that Lively's character is "charming but thinly written" which is a problem with most of the characters onscreen who can begin to "feel too one-note".

The critic added: "A strength of both the novel and Baldoni’s screen translation is how firmly the filmmaker anchors us in Lily’s perspective, which eases viewers into the most violent parts of the story. The time dedicated to understanding how Lily falls in love with Ryle heightens the emotional stakes of the florist’s difficult journey and shows how coercive abusive partnerships can be."

Deadline's Dessi Gomez felt similarly, but focused on heaping praise on Lively and saying of the actor: "Lively balances empathy and assertion. Her grace and calmness give way to quiet resolve as Lily faces down her and Ryle’s demons. Lively still sparkles with a hopeful joy in between the serious scenes, which lays the foundation for her convincing resilience."

Feeling more positive about the film, Variety's Owen Gleiberman wrote: "It Ends with Us is an overripe saga of love and romance that’d also about some very serious dark things. But when I say it’s a soap opera, I mean that as praise."

The critic adds that Lively is given "a role she can sink her acting chops into" and that she "fills the screen with her acutely aware and slightly tremulous radiance". He went on: "Love stories have more or less faded out of mainstream cinema, and it’s gratifying to see one that isn’t a rom-com, for once... it’s still a love story, just one about learning to love yourself."

The Guardian's Benjamin Lee praised the film's script, writing that it "boasts a sharp and much-needed self-awareness, taking a similar, and superior, tack to Kelly Marcel and Patrick Marber’s loose take on Fifty Shades of Grey."

Lee added: "It’s a plot of hackneyed soap tropes but there’s a real maturity to how it unfolds, a story of abuse that’s far less obvious than we’ve grown accustomed to, the details far knottier than some might be comfortable with. There are expected cliches but there are also many that are mercifully avoided too, the story not always conforming to type."

The critic called Lively "a warm and instinctive performer" and wrote that the film is full of "huge, sometimes hugely unsubtle, emotion but it has an effectively forceful sweep to it."

It Ends with Us premieres in cinemas on Friday, 9 August.