Review: Endless Love

Release date: February 14, 2014

Running time: 103 minutes

Starring: Gabriella Wilde, Alex Pettyfer, Bruce Greenwood, Bruce Greenwood, Joely Richardson
Who to see it with: Someone who wanted more romance in their Cloud Atlas

David:

Endless Love is a remake of the 1981 Brooke Shields classic. The film has been modified with some tweaks to the story, and updated with various plot and technological elements. The film follows an upper class girl who falls madly in love with a blue collar boy and all the issues that can come from that. As you would expect, some members of the girl's family are less than thrilled that she is having a summer fling, and a lot of the movie deals with him trying to win them over. This story sets up a drama-saturated summer love fest that has implications for the two protagonists far beyond their fleeting romance.

If the plot sounds predictable and cheesy, it's because it is. The movie doesn't so much seem like a genuine love story as what Hollywood execs and Abercrombie advertisers think a teen love story should be. The dialog is corny and cliched. There are some heartfelt moments but overall the lines are pretty bad and groan inducing. And, on top of this, the main characters both have noticeable accents. The film is set in Georgia, and the main characters supposedly have grown up there, so the presence of accents caught me off guard and was distracting when it shouldn't have been. Most of the characters are well thought out, but the overbearing, unrealistic dad is grating. It's fine to have him disapprove and be overly concerned, but what he does throughout the movie approaches sociopathic. In the end, Endless Love could have been a dramatic and innocent story about a summer fling, but it ends up being an unrealistic overly dramatized teen love story pulled from the worst of Hollywood.

Pass.