REVIEW: Endless Love an endless yawn

Rated: PG

2.5 out of 5

Now showing

IF THERE is one thing you should do for your man this Valentine’s Day ladies is not take him to see Endless Love.

Sure dinner and a movie is meant to be a romantic date and should thus include an equally romantic film, but I can assure you, your better half will only see the ‘endless’ and not the ‘love’ in this book adaptation.

Based on the Scott Spencer novel, Endless Love is your regular, run of the mill chick flick and hence should be watched with your girl friends.

It tells the story of David (Alex Pettyfer), the high school graduate from the wrong side of the track, who has been in love with the well-off, honour-roll teen, Jade (Gabriella Wilde) since he first saw her.

Unoriginal I know, but it should also be a winning formula for the perfect chick flick.

The plot is full of almost kisses, even more actual kisses, teenage hormones, montages of them playing flirtatiously through parks and lots of gazing into each others eyes.

But what doesn’t bode well for a winning formula is not injecting anything new into it.

The main conflict is Jade’s dad (Bruce Greenwood).

The overprotective father, who is still emotionally recovering from his eldest son’s death, thinks his pre-med student daughter is too good for her middle class boyfriend.

However for that to fly with the audience one of two things needed to happen.

Either David should have been more of a bad boy character, or hung out with the wrong crowd.

As he was, David was too nice for it actually be a believable scenario of the dad thinking his daughter's boyfriend was dangerous.

Or what also would have worked, and only slightly more original, would be if Jade was actually only going into pre-med because her Dad wanted her late brother to.

It would make sense since it was mentioned in the film that the older brother did want to take the same career path, and with Jade working so hard to get ahead in her career before she even reached college, it only seemed fitting. 

No, instead she decided to give up an important, hard to come by internship for a guy she’s only known for two weeks.

Something which will divide the audience into thinking either ‘true love is more important than a career’, or ‘that just put women’s rights back another 20 years’.

That’s the problem with Endless Love – you come out of it thinking of ways it should have happened.

Sure there’s nothing especially bad about this film, but there’s nothing especially good about it either.

Being shown knock-off scenes from other romance films for almost two hours does get boring and predictable after a while – especially for the male counterparts in the audience who were dragged along to watch it.

So ladies, if you want a romance film where you can zone out and not have to think, this is it – just go see it with the girls.