I felt personally attacked by new Colleen Hoover movie Regretting You

You may not have realised, given how long the It Ends With Us legal drama has been drawn out between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, but it’s been over a year since we had a Colleen Hoover book adaptation in cinemas.

And while It Ends With Us did impressively brisk business at the box office, it was somewhat overshadowed by the toxic – and still ongoing – fallout.

But best-selling author and BookTok (the rabid reader section of TikTok) sensation Hoover is a prolific writer, with over 20 titles to her name and more than 20 million copies sold, so here comes the latest – Regretting You – along to hopefully distract from that whole fiasco.

And if Regretting You doesn’t do the trick, there’s Reminders of Him (Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers) and Verity (with big hitters Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett) coming down the line as well next year.

This time though, there’s a buzzy young cast – led by Ghostbusters’ McKenna Grace and How to Train Your Dragon’s Mason Thames and supported by Allison Williams and Dave Franco.

Regretting You also has The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone at the helm too, ready to weave his romantic book adaptation wand once more.

But there’s only so much you can do with Hoover’s source material, which is not one of her most popular works – just one of her more recent, published in 2019 (her huge back catalogue dates from 2012 and was originally self-published).

Don’t get me wrong, there’s an audience out here for this kind of lightweight family drama that tries to be both poignant and weepy but also cool and hilarious. It was probably me when I was a teenager.

But one of the most sobering parts of the whole experience was realising the banging tracks Boone had selected to play during flashbacks – including the Killers’ When You Were Young and Dakota by The Stereophonics – were to signal history, the before times and the parents’ generation, played by Williams, Franco, Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald – at high school.

Here I was, aggressively being told that I could well be old enough to have children on the cusp of adulthood – and anyone else 30 or older may feel similarly targeted.

Of course, this is beside the point of assessing this film for its cinematic merit, and I can still give – and do give – points for a solid soundtrack; it’s just a shame nothing else from Regretting You has really stuck in my head as much.

The able actors do their best, but most of the time it feels like watching an episode of The OC from after season three when Marissa Cooper was killed off and everybody stopped watching – it’s merely going through the motions with nothing much to say for itself.

This comparison is particularly – and unfortunately – clear for the scenes set in 2007, where Williams, Franco et al are trying to get away with playing 20 years (plus) younger. No matter how attractive you are, it’s always a futile and slightly cringey exercise.

In present day, Grace plays Clara, a 16-year-old with ambitions to study acting at college and leave her small hometown behind, the same hometown her parents, Morgan (Williams) and Chris (Eastwood) never managed to escape after becoming teenage parents.

Meanwhile, she’s messaging the most popular boy in school, Miller (Thames) and confessing all about it to her aunt Jenny (Fitzgerald), who has recently welcomed a baby with her old high school sweetheart, (Franco’s Jonah, who also happens to be one of Clara’s teachers) after a brief fling.

Still with me after that?

But after a family tragedy, shocking secrets come to the surface as Clara tried to adapt to grief as well as the rush of young, first love.

Thames does play a sweet and likable boy, who’s not out for anything other than to see where things go with Clara – and to help his frail grandpa (a criminally underused Clancy Brown) get his favourite pizza delivered to his house. This is how we first meet him, moving the sign marking the city limits, in a sweet move I could see 13-year-olds doodling about in their notebooks.

Although it’s then compromised by a very lame returning  gag about pineapple on pizza, like that hasn’t been done to death on every dating profile everywhere, let alone in movies.

But Thames and Grace share a believable chemistry and tackle a refreshingly frank handling of sex when you don’t really know what you’re doing.

Meanwhile, Williams and Grace get the meatiest scenes as they try to heal their relationship as mother-daughter, while Jonah struggles from the sidelines. None of them could have done more with their characters.

 It’s just a shame that Regretting You overall is quite a bland and forgettable package in the over-stuffed genre of coming-of-age/romantic drama movies.

Regretting You is released in US and UK cinemas on Friday, October 24.

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