To give credit where due, It Ends With Us knows its likely audience. Or, rather, it knows exactly which quadrant in the four square it’s interested in and makes no bones about the chase. Based on the bestselling novel by self-publishing sensation Colleen Hoover, the film shoots from the hip in search of wildly underserved female filmgoers. This as Deadpool lops arms off in the screen next door – which is not to say Swifties don’t love Marvel too. Where that film scored massacres to Madonna, however, It Ends With Us tailors to Taylor. It’s a glossy and endlessly Instagrammable affair, with floral imagery and synthy soundtrack ballads deployed to almost parodic effect. Real life is messy, It Ends With Us is anything but.
If you thought Deadpool & Wolverine would exercise one iota of patience before wheeling out its show pony – the return of Hugh Jackman to his X-Men origins – then you thought wrong. Shaun Levy’s threequel is but seconds into action when Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool brandishes the shovel with which he will dig up old man Logan’s grave. It’s a deliciously tasteless opening to an often tastelessly delicious film. Funny, brash and casually bloody, Except, hold up, the body within has wasted away. Just the skeleton remains. The bare bones of former glory. It feels apt and, for once, unironic. For all the gags here levelled at Marvel’s expense, this Merc hasn’t any of the answers for long-term rejuvenation.
If the pervading memory of Jan de Bont’s 1996 block-fluster Twister is an image of bovine aeronautics, it’s hard to picture how its instantly less iconic 2024 sequel, from Minari director Lee Isaac Chung, will be remembered. Perhaps only in retrospectives examining Glen Powell’s sharp rise to megastardom. Two decades of graft lie behind the chiselled Texan’s supposed overnight success. Having made his debut in 2003’s third Spy Kids flick, Powell has successfully bit-parted his way through all from The Dark Knight Rises to Expendables 3. The winds changed with Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You but now they’re very much stormin’ high.
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