Metacritic reviews

Forever My Girl doesn’t stray from the formula or do anything revolutionary. But for an audience seeking fluffy, escapist, country music-tinged romance, it’ll hit a sweet spot.

It's difficult to entirely resist the film's heartwarming portrait of decent people who genuinely care for each other and strive to do the right thing.

The movie also trumpets hometown values, and makes fun of the way Liam’s wealth and fame have insulated him from simple pleasures of small-town life (underlined by director Bethany Ashton Wolf’s cozy visual presentation). The movie pokes fun at his materialism, when it’s not indulging in it.

The country-fried romance written and directed by Bethany Ashton Wolf becomes a victim of self sabotage as it nears its (predictable) conclusion, removing any good will it created in its first half.

Aficionados of Nicholas Sparks movies may swoon over this film’s distressed T-shirts and kudzu-choked back roads, but lovers of love stories deserve much better.

Forever My Girl is a bad movie, pure and simple. And pure and simple is just how writer and director Bethany Ashton Wolf likes it.

Wolf establishes only a half-formed idea of the decisions, fights, and silences that have shaped these characters’ lives, so the cast often seems to be shouting into a vacuum.

The overarching problem is pacing and dramatic tension.

The movie isn’t as off-the-charts shameless as Sparks, but it lacks the Russian roulette death-guessing game to occupy viewers who get bored.

This bland romance doesn’t take its own advice. It’s all water, no whiskey.