The ladies didn't exactly have it much better than the men.
Whatever cynicism that I may spout off in the desire
to produce a satisfactory critique dressed in the skin of an entertaining
examination of media, I take pride in personally being a romantic.
The notion may seem childish to some but I fully
believe in people being drawn together by a primarily emotional connection that
transcends our baser instincts. Just because purity in this world is a rarity
doesn't mean it's nonexistent, nor is it an excuse to give up searching for it.
Romance is hard to find and even harder to hold on to but worth fighting for.
That's what makes the treatment of romantic dramas as low standard dumping
ground for audiences both highly impressionable and less discerning so painful
for me to watch.
On the surface, “Endless Love” is a straight
forward, shallow, predictable and borderline unrelatable load of dreck with
plenty to dislike. Unfortunately, you don’t have to dig particularly deep to
see how disturbingly detestable the film really is.
Rich but shy high school graduate Jade invites
David, who’s been crushing on her from afar for years, to a dud of a post-grad
party that only picks up once he uses his social connections to give the
gathering a jolt of life, catching Jade’s eye in the process. Unfortunately,
her father doesn't approve of his graduated 18 year old adult daughter’s relationship
with a hardworking, intelligent, polite, middle class young man, forcing her to
refuse her once in a lifetime internship and highly prestigious college in
order to spend her Summer with David after meeting him, getting to know him for
about 3 days and having sex with him within a week because, of course, every
relationship worth throwing the future away for makes itself known within a
week and a half.
“Endless Love” feels like some sort of giant
misguided interpretation of a scenario that is downright disturbing with any
sort of logic applied to it.
Jade’s stupidity in throwing away her potential to
spend 3 months with a man with a troubled past that she’s known for less than 2
weeks is continuously and sincerely cheered on with no criticism or irony
whatsoever. This would be bad enough but on top of that, not only do Alex Pettyfer
and Gabriella Wilde have little chemistry with one another, but their
characters lack even a hint of common ground that would barely make even a
friendship, much less a romance, believable.
Her antagonistic father, played by a laughably
one-note psychotic Bruce Greenwood whose talents are wasted, fairs no better as
the logic that he brings to the situation is completely diffused by his insane
obsession with tearing down somebody that isn't quite the source of his family
problems.
And all of this ignoring the fact that the main characters
are 2 LEGAL AND CONSENTING ADULTS, which undercuts the already immensely
backward stupidity of the entire film, because he should be powerless.
This kind of logic saturates the film with what
could almost have been an excellent satire on its genre. Sadly however, “Endless
Love’s” straight laced execution of its mangled understanding of reality slowly
whittles away what little fun one could have with poking fun at it once you
really breakdown how little complexity there is to anything going on. That it
was apparently an adaptation of a novel that deconstructed all of the notions
of love at first sight being everlasting doesn't exactly earn it points either.
The best thing that I can say about “Endless Love”
is that it has left severely conflicted. As dangerous as the ideas of childishly
throwing life aside for brief hormonally driven affairs in a brief period of
time that the movie so desperately pushes are, at least it did give me
something to think about.
Disgustingly offensive? Sure but does that make it
worse than the vapidly boring “The Best of Me?”
Before exploring that question, let me make it very
clear that I have no personal quarrel with Nicholas Sparks’ or his works, literary
or cinematic.
They’re not deep, they’re rarely believable, and
more often than not, they’re bad in varying ways. However, even at they’re
laziest. I’ve never quite found them to be offensive in the slightest. They’re
Michael Bay movies for the opposite demographic.
“The Best of Me” may be the tipping point of that
stance of enforced neutrality.
Even if you haven’t seen the films, the formula has
become infamous at this point; 2 pretty white people meet under contrived coincidence,
stick together despite constantly hanging around one another for few discernible
reasons, undergo a conflict that brings up the fallout of bizarre tragic
circumstances of their past and overcome their overly dramatic problems to hook
up with each other. The formula arguably lends itself to lazy filmmaking but “The
Best of Me” is quite possibly the laziest of the lot.
Like “Endless Love,” the film is peppered with a
plethora of poorly directed scenes that could easily be twisted into a satire
of its genre and its author. From the weird continuity of the film that somehow
turns a teenage Luke Bracey into an adult James Marsden, to the antagonists being
composed of the most hilariously cartoonish redneck stereotypes I've seen in
years, there are highlights that almost generated hard laughs from me.
Unlike “Endless Love” however, the bad moments are
fluffed up with content that’s just plain boring.
In typically bad Romance fashion, the leads are
lacking in any sort of chemistry or personality and wasting the potential of
its leading actors. The Sparks formula has gotten so predictable that the fun
has been sucked out of even ironic enjoyment of the films, making a straight
forward hour and a half long experience feel twice as long.
Only in the film’s final 25 minutes, does it cross
over into any vaguely surprising territory just to become so stupid through the
use of 2 twists that completely torpedoed all of the credit that I desperately
tried to give it by meeting it half way.
I honestly can’t decide on whether its shoddiness
puts it lower. “The Best of Me’s” provides a weird poster child for the need to
evolve formulas, as the layout for a passable product as there yet through
sheer laziness, it somehow fails to even be competent.
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