Endless
Love
It’s the greatest love story no one ever wanted told.
Alex Pettyfer stars as David – the misunderstood bad boy
mechanic with a soft heart from the wrong side of the tracks. He just
spent most of his high school years with an unrequited love (or lust)
for Jade(Gabriella Wilde) – the lonely, outcaste
blonde-haired, blue-eyed, dewy, long-legged girl from a rich family
with a perfect smile, but no friends (because no one in high school
wants to hang out with THAT girl).
Of course, David and Jade finally realize each is interested in the
other, and it leads to a passionate, torrid affair that has
Jade’s Dad, Hugh (Bruce Greenwood), concerned this bad boy is
unleashing his daughter’s inner wild child!
Are Jade and David meant to be together forever?
Will Daddy break them up, using any means necessary?
Sadly, this movie proves RoboCop
is still the most romantic movie premiering the week of
Valentine’s Day.
It’s not so much that Endless
Love is bad (because it is), but
Endless Love
is completely bland until it falls apart in a series of ridiculous
melodramatic twists and moments. Co-writer/director Shana Feste and
co-writer Joshua Safran play it safe and boring as they create (or, I
guess we should say re-create since it is based on the 1981 movie), a
typical, run-of-the-mill, very old fashioned, immature teen girl
fantasy complete with the young lady displaying her independence by
making bad decisions in the most obnoxious way possible.
The audience gets plenty of meaningless scenes of David and Jade
looking all googly eyed at each other with exclamations of undying
love, and we get the requisite scenes of Daddy becoming all hot and
bothered under the collar at the whole situation, but, of course,
he’ll be upset because he’s the stuffy rich guy who
is out of touch with the passions of young people (the stereotypical
villain). If it all stayed there, Endless
Love would be forgettable tripe,
but it doesn’t stay there.
Feste loses the story as Daddy’s actions to rid his family of
the menace he calls David boil over. The melodramatic escalation
becomes laughable, as does poor Greenwood’s dialogue. You
have to feel bad for a professional like him, as well as Robert Patrick
as David’s Dad and Joely Richardson as Jade’s Mom.
They know how bad all of this is, and the audience is laughing at how
bad it is, but they persevere.
It’s one thing when Pettyfer opens up the movie with a
narration that comes off more as creepy and lecherous because
that’s the best work he can do and should get. The others
should have better options. Even Wilde would be better off as a model.
Endless
Love is rated PG-13 for sexual content, brief partial nudity, some
language and teen partying.
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