I think Alex Pettyfer is the worst, and Endless Love doesn’t do anything to
dissuade me of that notion. Sure, he’s a slab of muscular manmeat. But he’s
also a horrendously inexpressive actor, the kind of guy for whom a half-smile
and an eyebrow raise look like work. As the male lead you’re supposed to adore
and root for in Endless Love, he
simply isn’t successful—and he’s in shared company, since the rest of the movie
is frustratingly mediocre, too.
The premise is this: working-class guy David
(Pettyfer) has been interested in beautiful rich girl Jade (Gabriella Wilde)
for years, but she’s been a social outcast since her older brother’s death from
cancer two years previously. It’s only on their graduation day that David
finally works up the nerve to talk to her, earning an invitation to her
graduation party. He clearly doesn’t belong there—and Jade’s doctor father Hugh
(Bruce Greenwood) makes that abundantly, cartoonishly obvious. So naturally,
the response from David and Jade is to go make out in the dark. Duh!
With that begins the Abercrombie-advertisement
portion of Endless Love, with Jade
and David spending all their free time together—kissing while swimming, kissing
while driving, kissing while everything—and Hugh angrily glaring and harrumphing
about how Jade might be messing up her future of college and medical school
with this relationship. Jade has never stuck up to Hugh before, and their
family has been so broken after her brother’s death, that this relationship
with David seems like a serious transgression. But, as people in the film keep
parroting over and over again, “You have to fight for love!” Yeah, OK, we get
it.
Eventually the film devolves into Hugh pulling crazy
underhanded move after crazy underhanded move to get Jade and David to break
up, and then a variety of absurd plot twists to display the “urgency” here: a
car crash, a fire, a run through an airport, increasingly repetitive declarations
of love. But I wrote “urgency” back there because the film never really
succeeds in raising the stakes, in making the conflict here feel realized. The Notebook had the problem of Ryan
Gosling’s character going to war, as so many Nicholas Sparks novels and film
adaptations do, and last year’s The Vow
had Rachel McAdams’s character trying to regain her memory. But in Endless Love, the issue is … Jade’s
father will be mad at her? OK, well, get over it.
Mundaneness of the story aside, there’s also the
issue of Pettyfer and Wilde together; sure, they’re both pretty, but they don’t
have any notable zing as a couple. Lots of kissing does not necessarily
sexiness make. And in comparison with the ‘80s version of Endless Love, which had teenagers so crazily in love with each
other that they left arson and homicide in their wake, this 2014 version feels
especially toothless. A girl only stands up to her domineering father because of
her boyfriend … and that’s it? Oh, OK. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Don’t
spend it watching Endless Love.
Rating: 0.5 out of 5
Guttenbergs
