Endless Love Review

Director: Shana Feste.

Starring: Alex Pettyfer, Gabriella Wilde, Bruce Greenwood, Joely Richardson, Robert Patrick, Rhys Wakefield, Dayo Okeniyi, Emma Rigby, Anna Enger.

Running Time: 103 minutes.

Certificate: 12A.

Synopsis: The story of a privileged girl (Gabriella Wilde) and a charismatic boy (Alex Pettyfer) whose instant desire sparks a love affair made only more reckless by parents trying to keep them apart.

A solemn voiceover describing how the love found one summer changes lives forever is how we are introduced to this woeful coming-of-age tale of innocence lost and love gained. If you’re thinking the only way is up from there then you have seriously misjudged ENDLESS LOVE, as every cliché in the book is thrown at the audience during the course of this derivative and tiresome movie.

We start with a family coping with the death of the middle son, an overprotective and grieving father (Bruce Greenwood) who hasn’t quite dealt with the death and takes his grief out on his other children. Next up is his beautiful but shy daughter Jade (Gabriella Wilde) who’s spent high school with her eyes on the prize but come graduation sets her eyes on a boy and is instantly besotted. Said boy is David (Alex Pettyfer) and he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, so the filmmakers would have us believe. Yes, he works as a valet and his father is a mechanic, but that hardly makes him the devil – now if he had a fondness for white vests and dancing we’d consider him really dangerous. Later on in the movie you see a ‘dark’ backstory created for David in an attempt to add some tension to the relationship, which Jade promptly ignores (the only kudos you can give her character). Not quite so forgiving is her father who, following an after-hours zoo visit and a minor car crash involving his daughter (we weren’t lying about the clichés) takes a restraining order out on David.

Not wishing to bore you with any more details of this tedious plot, let us move swiftly on to the montage. Yes, halfway through the movie we are treated to an insufferable ‘best of summer’ montage to show us just how amazing the journey of this couple is, how much fun they have and how in love they are. Don’t worry if you didn’t quite catch it though, as David helpfully scrawls it in condensation on a truck window for those a little slow on the uptake.

Writer/director Shana Feste seems compelled to make movies about how the loss of a child can impact a family, with her previous two efforts THE GREATEST and COUNTRY STRONG also focused on the theme. If ENDLESS LOVE contained an ounce of originality or excitement in its script, it might have been an interesting movie about the wide-reaching and often subconscious effects of the death of a loved one. Instead, with a predictable script and not one bold acting or directing choice considered, the outcome is a dull, unoriginal and throughly forgettable entry on the CVs of all involved; something they should ultimately all be quite grateful for. Gabriella Wilde and Alex Pettyfer are both young enough to put this down to naive project choices, but quite what Bruce Greenwood and Joely Richardson can blame is a mystery.

There’s nothing utterly terrible about ENDLESS LOVE and nothing particularly upsetting or traumatising occurs other than the movie itself. Is it so bad to be a movie devoid of any depth or interest? Is it such a crime to make a movie this bland? When you bring absolutely nothing original to a genre that, thanks to movies like this, receives a terrible reputation as it is, then the answer is yes. When one year alone can produce fantastic movies about losing a child (PHILOMENA, GRAVITY), beautifully crafted films looking at parent/child relationships (ABOUT TIME) and genuinely moving features about young love (BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR, THE WAY WAY BACK) there’s no excuse for movies like ENDLESS LOVE.

[usr=1] ENDLESS LOVE is released in UK cinemas on Friday 14th February, 2014.