<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Directed by Jenny Gage. Starring Josephine Langford, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Selma Blair, Jennifer Beals, Peter Gallagher, Dylan Arnold, Pia Mia, Khadijha Red Thunder

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes

I was reading something about how they shouldn’t be called ‘chick flick’, films with high-romance, and then I watched this movie and disagreed with the article. Only women can still think trash and lies like this are relevant or even acceptable. And if they do, they deserve all the grief and disappointment they get for the assholes they choose to date.

Apparently, the film has something to do with a series of online articles by Anna Todd that became really popular. They were based on One Direction (the boy band, I assume) but I have no idea about anything related to One Direction’s band members’ love life. So I don’t really care about that aspect. Seeing as it is a chick flick, I sort of expected what was about to come. And while the film did make me smile now and then, the sheer stupidity of it all made me wonder: ‘Are women really that stupid, and if so, perhaps they don’t deserve equality after all’

So, dump and friendzone the childhood boyfriend who cares about you for the bad boy with an accent who treats you like rubbish. That’s the moral of this ‘love story’, all based on the premise ‘people do change’ (which they basically don’t).

Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) starts off college as the good girl who reads books and wears conservative clothes to parties. While at such a party she meets Hardin (really, Hard-in!!) Scott, and the sexual tension is thicker than his Brit accent. I think he sounds pretty daft actually and his stilted dialogue made me laugh out loud a couple of times. That he sounds so dumb doesn’t really compute with his recitation of passages from classic novels like Wuthering Heights. And apart from this and his love of tattoos, we don’t really get a deeper picture of this boy who at first doesn’t believe in love and then very quickly does.

Some steamy love making scenes ensue overlapped with recognisable pop tracks, a mother who feels like this new boy will break her heart (and we know that’s coming soon), his father, who he has issues with (obviously), getting married to a white woman with a black son (to further the cause of diversity what with Brits and Americans being such good allies).

It’s all way too icky right from the get go. The boy seduces her and then quickly says he doesn’t date. She of course, is still concerned (read ‘horny’) and takes him back, hurting her existing boyfriend who later becomes her best friend. Hardin is nice to her eventually, but he seems like a moody bugger. Obviously there’s a bit of a nasty twist, which you sort of see coming and then you’re like, okay, so what! She of course over-dramatises it so that he has to make a grand gesture to prove his love and then they can both inevitably reunite. So cliché that it makes you wonder if all women really, truly believe this is the way true love happens. And if so, that they really truly deserve all the grief they get after for picking bad boys.