I don't think I've seen another movie that induced as many eye rolls.

Rating: 1/10 (24 August 2014)

I am actually the target audience for this movie- a teenage girl. If I Stay is about Mia Hall- the one sided protagonist- who gets into a car accident and must decide during an out of body experience if she wants to live or die. Mia is supposed to be "quirky" and "loveable" but I hated her. There are only three things she likes. 1. Cello. 2. Classical music. 3. Adam. As if there weren't enough "I love him so much I'd waste away without him" movies already.
Speaking of Adam, he was a manipulative douche bag and I feel sorry for any teenage girl who takes him as an example of a good boyfriend. Apparently, if you kiss your girl and break into her house enough, that makes it OK for you to get mad at her for making her own decisions about her own future without consulting you, which is actually a huge red flag.
One major plot point that didn't make any sense was that Mia liked classical music while Adam and her family liked rock. According to If I Stay, people can't like more than one genre of music, and if they like one different than someone else, it's gonna be real hard for them to get along.
If I Stay is set in Portland, close to where I actually live. I can say with complete certainty that Portland is a very diverse city, yet the only POC I saw in this awful movie was the spiritual black woman whispering advice to Mia's comatose body. The main characters could have been a lot more varied, but apparently only white people are good enough to make a movie about. Seriously... even the other members of both Adam and Mr. Hall's band were white and they were barely even seen.
Speaking of diversity, when we find out the piano player in Willamette Stone is a lesbian, it's only because Mia is jealous of her relationship with Adam. Huge red flag. Her lesbianism is only used to further the assumption that boys and girls can't be Just Friends.
In the same sense, Mia's family is only killed off just so Adam can be the one to motivate Mia to stay, because it's """true love""". Give me a break.
Don't give your money to this movie. You'd be better watching The Fault in Our Stars and pretending the cancer is a car accident and imagining the Anne Frank House as a boathouse.