The premise of this movie had me very excited to watch. I am a sucker for chick flicks, romance movies and tear jerkers so this looked like it would be right in my wheelhouse. Unfortunately this never reached the heights it had the potential to go.
The movie is constructed as a tear jerker but while it gets close at times, they never do a good enough job of creating a close enough relationship with us and the main characters for us to care enough as we would in other great sad movies.
While Gugu Mbatha-Raw is fantastic in this movie, Michael Huisman's performance really drags the movie down as he is infuriating with a lack of emotion about the situation, both lack of sadness but also anger at Abbie's decisions and he just doesn't care enough which makes it hard to invest.
The decision in the middle of the movie that Sam makes is just plain stupid and left me not wanting him to end happy at all. The movie tried too hard to be different when they already had a great idea with a fantastic actress that would have worked if they hadn't tried too hard to be unique.
The supporting parts were well done, particularly Christopher Walken, and I connected much more with his and Abbie's relationship in the movie than I did with Abbie and Sam's.
A final nitpick was that they made the strange decision not to have Abbie appear physically sick at all. Her appearance barely changes throughout and it just makes no sense and once again loses an opportunity for us to connect.
Some great acting overall but it gets dragged down by a bad performance from Michael Huisman and poor writing. So much potential and it is my favorite type of genre but really disappointed with the outcome.
