Lily Bloom and Ryle Kincaid don't really meet-cute. On a rooftop in Boston, he announces himself by angrily kicking a patio chair. She's up there trying to come to terms with her abusive father's death.
They talk about maraschino cherries, gun violence and flirt. There's something off about this pair. But there's also an obvious attraction.
So begins the uneven movie adaptation of Colleen Hoover's best-selling 2016 novel "It Ends With Us" starring Blake Lively, which tries to balance the realities of domestic violence inside a rom-com and a female-empowerment movie. All suffer in the process. It veers too close to melodrama, with suicide, homelessness, generational trauma, child murder, unintended pregnancy and never-forgotten love all touched on and only half digested.
Set in Boston, it never even pulls from that city's flavor. The film centers on Lively's Lily, a flower shop owner who finds herself in the middle of a complicated love triangle between hunky neurosurgeon Ryle — Justin Baldoni, who also directs — and her hunky high school sweetheart, Atlas, played with hangdog cuteness by Brandon Sklenar. There are red flags about Ryle but they aren't obvious until they're strung together, which takes, literally, years.
Credit to the filmmakers for not making the potential abuser so easy to wave a red flag about. The most powerful thing about "It Ends With Us" is the after-effects of domestic violence and how they unmoor those who witness or survive it. This could have bee.