‘Endless Love’ Review The poster of the film features the sentence “say goodbye to innocence”, a line that draws towards excitement. The film is neither exciting, nor it attempts to show any loss of innocence. It is, on the other hand, a lifeless portrayal of teenage love that has been told and re-told, failing every time. Shana Feste’s “Endless Love”, a remake of the also failed attempt by Franco Zeffirelli in 1981, fails to have a purpose for its existence and it disappoints greatly. But most significantly, it reaffirms the big fat rumor of the tasteless, insipid remakes Hollywood will never get tired of producing. The concern goes beyond the terribly awkward and tawdry dialogue the actors are forced to deliver; the true concern relies on the fact that the audience notices the film’s imperfection and its lack of emotional offering. To be clear, I wasn’t the only one laughing while the film achieved its climax, a scene supposed to bring tears to people’s eyes. The entire theater was. The story follows a young girl, Jade (Gabriella Wilde) who never had one friend in high school until she meets a cute boy, David (Alex Pettyfer) after graduation. They bond instantly and well, they fall in love. While she wants to be with him, she’s rich, he isn’t and she wants to go to college while he doesn’t, even though he has an extremely high SAT score. What are the odds? Jade’s father (Bruce Greenwood), is obstinate towards the young couple’s affair only to discover he’ll later become the film’s villain. He’ll do whatever he can to stop the romantic love story and force her bright daughter to leave town for a competitive internship program. The father, Hugh, is a character with no real intentions and he comes across as a cruel man with no reasoning for his behavior. There are some insinuations related to the loss of a child that really affected Hugh’s life, but it is not part of the main plot and it only seems to be used as an excuse by the screenwriter to make the story complex, just not believable. In fact, none of the interactions between the characters feel authentic. The script is overwritten and insincere, causing the film to have a zero emotional payoff. There isn’t a character in the film with a full emotional arc that can support the time frame destined in a feature film consequently having long, unnecessary sequences that drag the story to uneven places of discomfort and boredom. “Endless love” is the story of two pretty faces that want to be together and so they are. Sure, there is a violent fight, a fire and a car crash in between, but those events are external to the purpose of the characters in the story. There is no need for any of that to happen. I guess films that try too hard to be something, irritate me. You shouldn’t go to the movie theater to try to believe in the story; it should be an automatic, impulsive reaction to be invested it and find pieces of ourselves represented in the characters we see on screen. I think it is also important to state the fact that while “Endless Love” plays nationwide in Valentine’s Day and insistently disappoints, there are many independent films with much more tenacity and truthful examples of love, that struggle to even be seen by one full theater. -“Endless Love” is in theaters nationwide now.
