Regretting You (2025)

Another romantic drama based on a novel from Colleen Hoover, who seems to be quite the hot commodity when it comes to movie adaptations at the moment, Regretting You is a film that I didn't entirely dislike, but I couldn't fully enjoy. I tried to figure out exactly what the film was doing to turn me off, but I couldn't out my finger on it. Then it struck me. This is a film focused on a couple of teens that spends far too much of the runtime also showing us the lives of the adults. And it almost infantilises those adults, turning them into people simply cosplaying their own teen storylines alongside the actual teens.

Mckenna Grace is Clara Grant, daughter of Morgan (Allison Williams) and Chris (Scott Eastwood). Clara is going through some standard teen stuff, although that now includes an interesting development after an encounter with Miller Adams (Mason Thames), but she doesn't always want to confide in her mother. That's why she is happy to also have her Aunt Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), who appears to be happily married to Jonah (Dave Franco). Happiness is fleeting though, and Clara has her world turned upside-down when her father and her aunt both die in a car crash, creating a lot of pain and a need to reframe every memory held by Clara, Morgan, and Joshua.

Directed by Josh Boone (who has, let's say, mixed results throughout his filmography), this is standard stuff for anyone who knows what they're getting into. If you're familiar with Colleen Hoover, or if you've seen any of the films based on the works of Nicholas Sparks, then you'll know the mix of melodrama and gentle humour here. Whatever is happening is always BIG, it's love and hate stuff, life and death, and there are many silver linings to be seen amidst the gathering stormclouds.

Writer Susan McMartin struggles to adapt material that may well work better on the page, considering the time jump that starts things off and the frankly bizarre relationship complications that we watch playing out, but at least the younger cast members make the most of things.

Both Grace and Thames are performers I have enjoyed watching over the past few years, and seeing them used as nominal leads here is more satisfying than anything else in the film. Both do well with what they're given, and they get on with one another in a way that feels impressively natural. Williams is decent enough in her role, and certainly does much better work than Franco, Fitzgerald, or Eastwood, and there's another bonus point here for giving supporting roles to wonderful relative newcomer Sam Morelos and wonderful old-timer Clancy Brown.

Watch this in the right frame of mind, or in the right company, and you might appreciate the emotions of it all, the moments that have characters acting cute, and the infrequent laughs. Watch it in a bad mood though and you'll probably struggle to stop yourself from smashing your screen, particularly during the many times things slow right down to show Franco brooding more, either in the foreground or loitering behind another character he seems unable to be honest with.

5/10

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Prime Time: I Want You Back (2022)

Writers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger have an extensive body of work already, most of it in the realm of television, and it's clear that they know the same rom-com rules that the rest of us are all too aware of. I Want You Back is, despite some of the more twisted moments, a fairly traditional rom-com. Fortunately, it's a very enjoyable one.

Charlie Day is Peter, a man heartbroken when his partner, Anne (Gina Rodriguez), tells him that they shouldn't be together any more. Jenny Slate is Emma, a woman thrown into the same level of emotional pain when her partner, Noah (Scott Eastwood), delivers the same message. As Noah is developing a relationship with a woman named Ginny (Clark Backo), and Anne is cosying up to a colleague, Logan (Manny Jacinto), Peter and Emma come together in their grief, discover the mutual cause of their pain, and team up to get their exes back. Peter aims to befriend Noah, getting close enough to start having conversations with him that will make him doubt the strength of his relationship with Ginny, while Emma thinks she can seduce Logan, therefore separating him and Anne. Things soon get a bit messy.

Director Jason Orley hasn't been at the helm of too many projects so far. His first feature was Big Time Adolescence, which was then followed by a Pete Davidson TV special. As Davidson also makes a cameo appearance here, that's three for three. Perhaps Orley thinks that he is his lucky charm. He might be right. I recall enjoying what I saw of Big Time Adolescence (I need to revisit it though, my viewing was interrupted and I forgot to pick up again where I left off) and this film is an easy viewing choice for those who like the leads, those who want a few laughs, and those who will watch anything that comes under the umbrella of "rom-com".

Day and Slate are great in the lead roles. Both manage to balance their personas just right, showing how they have been hurt and want to hit back without making themselves seem like truly horrible people (even though their plan is absolutely horrible). Day gets to deliver the easier laughs, but Slate has a lot of the subtle and smarter lines throughout. Eastwood isn't bad here either, if he keeps this up then I may stop dreading his appearance in every movie, and Backo is very sweet as the new woman that he has fallen in love with. Rodriguez has a lot less to do, often at the edge of certain scenes until she serves as the final punctuation, but Jacinto is hilariously narcissistic and egotistical. There's also a great turn from Luke David Blumm, playing a young boy named Trevor who ends up being helped by Slate's character.

The situations get gradually more ridiculous, and amusing, there’s a wonderful sub-plot revolving around a stage production of Little Shop Of Horrors, and the last few scenes are sweet and predictable. This is very solid rom-com territory, and Day and Slate show how well they work with this kind of material. They soften their personas slightly, but not in a way that will upset people who have been fans of them for a long time already.

An easy watch, and I hope both Day and Slate have many more upcoming projects to make good use of their talents.

7/10

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Prime Time: Wrath Of Man (2021)

Guy Ritchie seems to be on a bit of a roll at a moment, having made use of his blockbuster success with the Sherlock Holmes movies to play around a bit more with projects that feel more in line with his earlier works without just feeling like regurgitated "mix tapes" of his past glories. Wrath Of Man may be a remake of a 2004 movie, Le Convoyeur (sadly, I haven't seen the original yet), but it's also great material for Ritchie to slot one of his favourite stars into.

There's also a great remix of Folsom City Blues, familiar already to anyone who saw the trailer. Yes, it's so good that I am mentioning it here before I forget to mention it at all.

Jason Statham is H, a man who gets himself a job at a cash truck company. The company had a truck robbed some months before, a robbery that resulted in some deaths, but H doesn't seem bothered by the risk inherent in his new role. In fact, he seems to want robbers to try their luck with him. He definitely has his own agenda, and there's a lot more to him than he is revealing to his new work colleagues.

Having worked on the screenplay with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies (who also worked on The Gentlemen and the upcoming Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre), Ritchie uses a familiar bag of tricks - the friendly faces, a non-chronological approach to the main storyline, a good helping of dry wit - to sugarcoat what may well be his darkest film yet. The film is broken into a number of chapters and one, entitled "Scorched Earth", stands out as being a mix of the cinematically stylish and the incredibly nihilistic. It's a flesh-coloured trip through a circle of hell that shows Statham's character beginning his quest for whatever it is that he's seeking.

Aside from Statham, being as great as ever in the lead role, the rest of the cast includes some fine supporting turns. Holt McCallany enjoys one of his best ever movie roles as Bullet, one of the main company staff members, straight-talking and with the potential key to information that would prove invaluable to H. Josh Hartnett is good fun as the "all mouth, no trousers" Boy Sweat Dave, Eddie Marsan is the depot boss, Jeffrey Donovan is someone who thinks they have a perfect robbery planned, and Scott Eastwood does his best work yet (not saying much though, compared to how bland so many of his other performances have been) as Jan, a robber with the kind of attitude that you just know is going to lead to trouble. There are other people doing good work here - Andy Garcia, Niamh Algar, Alex Ferns, Darrell D'Silva, etc - but they're very much minor moons orbiting the planets at the heart of the big set-pieces, although D'Silva still does enough to make himself an easy highlight.

I'll want to see the original movie at some point, and some people have said that it's a superior work, but this surprised me with how good it was. It's a classic tale of revenge, and the structure of the narrative helps the pacing and increases the tense gathering of thunderclouds and the impact of the storm that you just know is coming along in the third act. It's not one to watch if you want an action thriller grounded in any kind of reality, but it's a perfect choice if you want a superior Statham vehicle that has plenty of bloodshed, fun dialogue, a cause you end up rooting for, and a number of set-ups that are all paid off before the end credits roll.

8/10

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Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)

Following the sequel template, Pacific Rim: Uprising stars some lesser-known actors, compared to the first film, and isn't quite as good. Thankfully, it's still a lot of fun for those who enjoyed the world that the first film dropped us into.

John Boyega is Jake Pentecost (son of Stacker Pentecost, played by Idris Elba in the first film). Cailee Spaeny is a young girl named Amara Namani, a talented mechanic who keeps working to improve her single-pilot Jaeger (Jaeger = large, fighting robot for those who are playing catch up). Last, and least, is Scott Eastwood as Nate Lambert, a Jaeger pilot who has a past with Jake. All three come together, as well as some other, sadly forgettable, supporting players , when it looks as if there's a new threat from the monsters that had previously been thought dealt with. That's all you need to know.

As technically proficient as the first film, Pacific Rim: Uprising both benefits and suffers from the need to avoid just repeating the exact same set-pieces as the ones we already saw. The plot this time deals with upgrades and hybrids, which is fine, but also reduces the tension quite early on. Viewers can see that the new enemy is even stronger, and a lot tougher to beat, so the finale is very predictable from the first act. Director Steven S. DeKnight helps to offset this with some impressive, and impressively clear, visuals throughout. He knows that this is a huge helping of cheese (because who wouldn't know it?) and he at least makes the payoff worthwhile, keeping the Jaegers front and centre during the set-pieces that are interspersed throughout. Do you want quotable dialogue and thought-provoking explorations of responsibility and mortality or do you want to see a giant robot produce a giant pair of swords and use them against another giant robot? You can't have both, but the latter is a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

As much as I enjoyed Pacific Rim, the script was not it's strong point, and it's the same here. Without Travis Beacham or Guillermo del Toro taking care of things, it's left to Emily Carmichael, T. S. Nowlin, Kira Snyder, and DeKnight. They do what needs to be done in order to connect events and allow this to feel like a proper next chapter in the story, which it does, but they saddle the cast with a lot of lame lines in between the action beats.

That could have been easier to overlook if the cast were on good form with the material but, sadly, most of them aren't. Boyega is very good in the lead role, and both Charlie Day and Burn Gorman have fun reprising their scientist roles, but nobody else makes much of an impression. Spaeny and Eastwood don't have the charisma required to make this, at the very least, a decent three-hander, and the other supporting players fade into the background almost as quickly as they appear. At least Spaeny might do better in other roles, Eastwood is already making bland his standard acting style for every role (he may have the name of his father, but he didn't inherit his talent).

If you want to get your fix of giant robots fighting one another then this is much better than the majority of the Transformers series. It's not as good as the first, and it's no Real Steel, but it's a fun idea that is well-realised on the screen. And the bigger the screen you can watch it on, the better it will seem.

You can buy Pacific Rim: Uprising here.
Americans can pick it up here.