Allison Williams in Colleen Hoover’s lackluster film

Last year I seriously considered putting on Justin Baldoni’s It ends with us on my list of the best films of the year. The film takes a poorly written novel by mega-author Colleen Hoover and turns it into a compelling and often charming melodrama. Its universe is finely crafted, its main performance – from producer Blake Lively – is moving and surprising. It’s a good film, scandal be damned.

That’s why I had perhaps higher than average hopes for the sequel to Hoover’s adaptation, Regret you. The film is directed by Josh Boone, who has done wonders with his cinematic interpretation of the bestselling YA novel. The fault in our starsand I thought he might apply the same touch of zhuzing to one of Hoover’s dramatic novels. (A fault in our stars is, to be honest, much better source material.) Almost immediately, however, it’s clear that something is wrong.

Compared to the lacquer varnish of It ends with usBoone’s film is more chitzy, less aesthetically assured. It certainly doesn’t help that the film begins in the past, forcing actors Allison Williams, Dave Franco, Willa Fitzgerald and Scott Eastwood to play teenagers. It looks like they’ve aged a bit numerically, but for the most part they’re just a quartet of thirty-somethings playing with the free, enthusiastic energy of youth. There’s something garish about it, leaving a slight acrid odor in the air of the film even after moving forward 17 years.

These days, Williams’ character Morgan is the mother of teenager Clara (McKenna Grace), whom she conceived with her high school sweetheart, now husband, Chris (Eastwood). They seem to be a pretty happy family, even if their beginnings involved an unexpected teenage pregnancy and, consequently, the postponement of a dream or two. Morgan’s sister, Jenny (Fitzgerald), has just started her own family with Jonah (Franco), her own high school boyfriend, with whom she reunited after a long period of estrangement. Clara is quite close to her aunt and father, while – as these relationships so often are – more demanding with her mother.

Tragedy soon interrupts this pleasant scene, sending Morgan, Jonah, and Clara reeling in several directions. An indiscretion is discovered, new (and misplaced) guilt blossoms, and Clara runs headlong away from her mother and finds herself in the arms of Miller (Mason Thames), a sweet-faced kid quite often referred to in the film as “the coolest kid in school.” Miller has his own sad little story, but mostly he’s an emblem of easy, unpretentious goodness, a nice supportive shoulder for Clara to lean on, but not in a threatening way, and a place of burgeoning teenage desire.

Regret you is essentially divided into two plots that sometimes intersect, that of Morgan and Jonah’s healing and Clara’s budding romance. It’s not entirely clear why Clara’s storyline needs to be so important; It ends with us did very well by focusing on adults. Perhaps the calculation – initially Hoover’s, now Paramount’s – is that they can serve a dual clientele: mother and daughter (and a few sons) going to the movies together, one wanting a morally complicated romantic crybaby, the other moony-eyed on the Thames.

The result, however, is an erratic tonal chore that may not satisfy either party. The tragic side of things is approached rather casually – at times the film remembers the mind-boggling heartbreak and betrayal at its center, only to then just as quickly ignore it again. Williams, a brilliant and natural actor, is stuck with these emotional changes; she and Franco get lost trying to find their appropriate level. If the film had really focused on these two sick adults, I suspect both could have developed deeper, more compelling performances. As it is, they seem almost surprised and caught off guard when the camera pans towards them.

The film seems much more invested in the gooey back-and-forth of Clara and Miller’s romance, as light and fragile as Styrofoam. Credit to Boone for casting real teenagers to play teenagers (perhaps to compensate for the relative youth of the actors playing Clara’s family), but Grace nevertheless reads much older than Miller. Their chemistry is bad; a more palpable spark might have helped sell the bland and basic developments concocted by Hoover, Boone and screenwriter Susan McMartin.

Hoover’s novel strove more for Miller’s forbidden fruit; he comes from a bad family and Morgan therefore forbids Clara from seeing him. This tension is alleviated in the film, but only superficially. Most of the time, the children’s relationship slides along the rails, experiencing only the mild difficulties expected of adolescence. It’s rather boring.

Myriad other missteps are made. There’s a lot of woefully unsubtle product placement – for AMC theaters, Starry Soda, and even Paramount itself. Paramount’s films are so blatant that they’re almost endearing: Miller desperately wants to go to film school, and so his room is decorated, Dawson Leery-style, with movie posters. Only, the posters are not intended for Steven Spielberg films, as they were for Dawson. Rather, these are all the old Paramount releases. After all, what teenager from 2025 isn’t a fan of 1992? Patriot Games?

Clara has a best friend, Lexie (Sam Morelos), who exists purely for comic relief. Lexie is one of only two people of color in the film, the other being Miller’s colleague at the local AMC. Of course, the two are forced together in a substantive romance. At least Morelos nails a few funny lines – all the other laughs in the film are completely accidental.

What really bothers Regret you is its unavoidable lack of originality, its laborious, uninventive and ill-considered attempts at swoon and sorrow. With its sun-drenched North Carolina settings, maudlin score, and severely underdeveloped emotional and social intelligence, the film often evokes a feared entity: the cinematic oeuvre of Nicholas Sparks. I have no doubt that the intention was, in some way, to emulate America’s most successful smarm peddler, a riff on his wholesome vapidity with a little more scandal and sex and booze thrown in. But Regret you ends up as soggy as any Sparks slope, carelessly devastating everything that might have set it apart, or even elevated it.

In the film, Morgan and Clara live in a cute mid-century house, inherited from Chris’s parents, backing onto a lake. The kitchen features pristine original wood tones and is decorated with tasteful furniture to match. But throughout the film, Morgan grapples with all of this, trying to reinvent this space into something more. her. That says something about Regret you that what is revealed at the end is just plain and generic, worth only a half-hearted Instagram like before it got lost in the scroll.