Endless Love Reviews

Endless Love is a film for teens, so nobody in its target demo will probably care that it’s a remake of a 1981 movie that starred Brooke Shields. For the record, though, this version is nowhere near as bonkers as the original, in which moms spied with satisfied approval on their daughters having sex and people were accidentally killed and wrongly institutionalized left and right. If you’re hoping for some over-the-top operatic madness, 2014’s Endless Love doesn’t have what you’re looking for. But if you’re in the mood for a very, very earnest drama about 18-year-olds being soul mates, you’ve come to the right place.   The story is simple: David Elliot (Alex Pettyfer) has always had a thing for Jade Butterfield (Gabriella Wilde), but somehow never managed to speak to her throughout all of high school. In fairness, most of their graduating class didn’t really know her. This might have something to do with Jade’s rich, cliched, domineering father (Bruce Greenwood), who sees nothing wrong with his teenage daughter starting college despite having zero experience socializing with her peers. Nor does he foresee any conflict when he lines up Jade’s entire educational career when she’s only 17, setting her up with a medical internship the summer before she starts as a freshman in the premed program at Brown. Of course, it could be relevant that Jade’s older brother died of cancer some years back and her dad never quite got over it.   So when Jade and David hit it off right after graduation, Dad is none too pleased. He’s incensed when they participate in a montage of sharing one bicycle and kissing in the rain, and even madder when Jade says she wants to skip her internship in order to spend more time with David. We soon wonder if Jade’s father has totally lost his moral compass, and if he’ll resort to reprehensible measures to stop them from being together. Except we’re not really wondering, because clearly the premise of the movie is that he will.   This isn’t high art: It’s young-love-sploitation, Twilight without the vampires. And in that sense, Endless Love is right on the mark. Stories have been capitalizing on the explosive sense of urgency offered by teenage romance since Romeo and Juliet, and while this movie isn’t exactly a work of fine literature, it’s an adequate foray into the genre. However, if 2014’s Endless Love had included all of the criminal convictions and accidental deaths of the original, it might have bared a closer resemblance to Shakespeare.