This will not be a review of The Hating Game by Sally Thorne. The spoiler-free review of the novel is available to read, just click the link here!
Book to movie adaptations are especially great for people who don’t have the time to read a book over the course of 8–12 total hours. Episodic series adaptations require more of a time commitment, but one thing is almost unanimously agreed upon.
The book is usually better than the movie.
During a not-as-planned vacation, I had the opportunity to read and watch just about anything my heart desired. And I did.
Prior to the vacation, I read The Hating Game, and my copy had the circle on the cover that said “soon to be a major motion picture.” This is a book I purchased brand-new in 2023.
On my vacation, I was surprised to see on Hulu while binge-watching rom-coms at home that The Hating Game was already a movie as of 2021. Just to be sure, I looked it up to make sure it was the same movie. It was!
There are spoilers ahead!
Turn back now if you’d like to read The Hating Game or watch the movie without being spoiled.
No film adaptation is going to be perfect, and I will say that, for what it was, the movie wasn’t that bad.
So much was left out though. Almost an unforgivable amount. Some side characters ended up merging into one in the movie, and really important character-building was left out due to time (and likely budget) constraints.
Details were vastly different, too. Instead of shiny tile walls where Joshua and Lucy played their staring game, the walls in the movie were painted brick. The colors of his shirts changed, though I’m sure some color changes were in part to match some things that can’t be changed about the actress playing Lucy (eye color).
Of course, a reader’s interpretation of minor details will vary, so there is no one-size fits all method. I’m a stickler for the small details, so I notice when a model sports car gets picked up instead of the bus beside it.
Seeing Lucy’s dream in the film greatly entertained me. It was hilariously spicy in the book, and the humor did not disappoint in its brief screen time. Lucy Hale did a great job with the character’s reaction. The scene left out a significant portion of the dream, but it was enough to get the point across.
Quite a lot of scenes were shortened for the sake of the movie’s duration. Fitting an 8-hour read into 1 hour and 32 minutes can be hard. They sacrificed moments of important character building, the moments I really missed as someone who read the book.
The core scenes of The Hating Game remained in the movie, heavily condensed and a bit altered, but they got the necessary points across. The elevator, paintball, and wedding scenes hit the right marks, but I wished the movie was longer and allotted for the details to stay truer to the book.
The final line of the scene before the epilogue, the one that was intended to make a pretty big concluding impact, meant nothing because they cut out the section of the story that gave it any context. Unless the audience read the book, the “you’re a good guy” line served no purpose because there was never a moment in the movie that Joshua addressed the issue he had with being abandoned for the typical good guy.
I’m paraphrasing from memory; I don’t remember the quote verbatim, but I know the scene it was supposed to refer to.
I liked some of the changes they made to scenes, too. I think my favorite was the added scene where Lucy started to write out Smurf fan-fiction. The laugh I let out was 100% unexpected. I can see her character doing exactly that in her free time.
Ultimately, the book is better, but for a rom-com film adaptation, it was easy to watch and wasn’t all that bad. I thought it was worth watching.
Sorrin Reads 