Movie Review: Marked Men: Rule + Shaw (2025)
This past weekend, I was searching for a romance movie to give me ALL the feels and I wasn’t disappointed with this one! Check out my full movie review of Marked Men: Rule + Shaw (2025) below.
Movie Blurb
Shaw (Sydney Taylor) is a good girl, trust fund, college student working multiple jobs and always studying to make sure she never has to use her mother’s money. Rule (Chase Stokes) is a bad boy tattoo artist who sleeps with any woman he can. Rule and Shaw are tied together by a tragic accident that broke them both nearly three years ago. But Rule sees Shaw as the good girl that he should never touch. Shaw, on the other hand, knows that he’s the only one she wants.
Review | Heidi Dischler
UGH finally a romance movie that didn’t utterly disappoint me. I just recently watched Love Me, Love Me (2026) and was highly unimpressed with the acting and the writing as a whole. I wanted something a little more angsty like My Fault: London (2025). Marked Men: Rule + Shaw? Finally brought me back to that feeling that My Fault: London gave me.
With Marked Men: Rule + Shaw, I knew as soon as the two leads interacted that it was going to be a good romance movie. A lot of times, for me at least, it isn’t about the story as a whole as much as it is about your leads (with romance at least). Chase Stokes and Sydney Taylor had great chemistry (and I honestly have not liked Chase Stokes in a lot of movies I’ve watched with him). There were a LOT of cringe moments (“Want me to be a cat?” anyone???), but overall, the general vibes between Chase and Sydney as Rule and Shaw was on point. The chemistry changes the game when it comes to romance movies.
As far as storytelling goes as a whole, the tragic event that pulls Rule and Shaw together is pretty solid as far as character-changing events go, but I feel like we didn’t get enough discussion or backstory to really make it count. With side characters and their places in the story, no one truly matters besides Rule and Shaw. Shaw’s best friend, Jordynn (Inanna Sarkis), probably had the most additional screen time in terms of development and moving in any direction at all as a character. Other than that, it seemed to me like a lot of the side characters were plot devices or just there for show (but My Fault: London felt like that as well and I still really really enjoyed it). Not saying this is a dealbreaker for me, but it does make a difference.
Since I’m talking about characters, I absolutely loved seeing Alexander Ludwig as this grown up “big brother” type for Rule. I’m gonna be honest, I had to look up his name in the movie (it’s Rome, by the way) since I don’t feel like it was mentioned often, but I really enjoyed Ludwig’s character (with one of my favorite scenes happening with him that I’ll talk about in the spoilers). My other favorite side character was definitely Shaw’s best friend, Jordynn. Inanna Sarkis did an amazing job bringing this character to life and giving her ALL the charisma and things that a girl needs in a best friend.
The overall vibe of this movie that you’ll get is one of those popular BookTok books that gives you a whole lot of drama with the romance that you get to watch unfold (honestly these are my guilty pleasures anyway in a book haha), which this is a book anyway that’s actually called Rule.
Spoilers ahead.
My very favorite scene in the whole movie was when Alexander Ludwig’s character, Rome, legit is chastising Rule for getting locked up until Rule says that Gabe (Michael Bradway) hit Shaw. Then, here comes Rome to whoop some ass 😂. It was awesome and such “big brother” moves. I also literally gasped when Gabe did slap Shaw because DANG he hit her hard.
Overall, I really did enjoy this movie. It had drama, romance, and HUGE chemistry between our leads. So, if you enjoy the My Fault series, movies like Perfect Addiction, or just B-romance movies that will make you swoon in general, you’ll definitely love this one (because I did).
Where to Watch:
