Remake 'My Girl' for Gen Z, You Cowards!

My daughters both watched Prime Video’s YA-tinged The Last Sunrise — based on Anna Todd’s novel — and while neither loved it, they thought it was “OK.” They’re 14, and I love them dearly, but also: They’re wrong. For something like The Last Sunrise, there’s a basic checklist to meet the minimum OK threshold: Is the guy (Fernando Lindez) hot? Check. Does the woman (Maia Reficco) sing? Check. Does she have a good voice? Check. Does she sing a good song? Check. (The karaoke version of TLC’s “No Scrubs” is actually the best moment in the movie.)

There aren’t a lot of teenagers reading Pajiba, because teenagers don’t know what websites are anymore. Our audience demands more than a hot guy — though, granted, not a lot more. There also needs to be a decent story, and that’s mostly where The Last Sunrise falls apart.

Reficco plays Ry, an aspiring dancer whose career is derailed by a seizure disorder, leaving her with two choices: surgery, which would likely erase most of her memories, or medication, which staves off the seizures but dulls her emotionally. Ry opts for pills, and she and her mom, Isolde (Eva Longoria, for the Gen Xers), spend the summer in Majorca, where Isolde is busy with a land development deal that could destabilize the local economy, and the island where Isolde herself grew up.

Ry doesn’t stay on the medication long, because there needs to be conflict. She wants to feel alive, and she feels particularly alive when she falls for Julian (Lindez), a local who despises tourists and cliché. They fall in love, but Julian’s in trouble with local loan sharks over a loan he took out to save his father’s fishing business. The only escape appears to be selling the business to a developer.

You can probably guess who that developer is (Pssst. it’s Ry’s mom) and that Isolde and Julian’s father were childhood sweethearts, too. When Ry has a major health scare from stopping her meds, Isolde’s hard-nosed business approach softens, because this is a YA movie where happy endings are apparently contractual obligations (except the John Green types, where a teenager dies devastatingly). This isn’t a John Green type. It occasionally threatens to be, and the film probably would’ve been far more effective if it had committed to that darkness instead of settling for a fairly predictable YA package adorned with a nice backdrop and an abundance of beachwear.

It almost had the guts to honor its title, The Last Sunrise, but alas, optimism won the day because kids these days are too soft! Back in my day, we played in traffic and watched Beaches! Remake My Girl for Gen Z, you cowards!