Oh, what a disappointing film this turned out to be!

When the trailer for Endless Love came out way back in the closing days of 2013, both me and my BFF Evelyn were seriously excited about seeing it.  The trailer was great!  It featured Florence + The Machine!  The movie looked hot and sexy and fun and…

Well, let’s just rewatch the trailer, shall we?

Here’s the thing:  Sometimes, trailers lie.

I saw Endless Love when it was originally released in February but I didn’t review it.  I meant to review it but somehow I never got around to doing so.  And, unfortunately, the film itself was so bland and forgettable that I actually struggled to think of anything to say about it.  Some movies make you laugh.  Some movies make you cry.  Some movies make you mad.  And some movies are just there.

Endless Love is a just there type of movie.

That said, when I saw that Endless Love would be making its cable debut on Cinemax on Saturday night, I decided to give it a second chance.  “Who knows?” I thought to myself, “Maybe I just went into the film with unrealistic expectations.  Maybe I was just in a bitchy mood when I saw it.  Maybe, on a second viewing, I’ll discover that Endless Love works on a purely emotional level…”

No such luck!  Having watched Endless Love a second time, I can now actually remember enough about the film to finally get around to writing a review.  However, I have also now been reminded why I didn’t care much about the film the first time I saw it.

Endless Love is essentially a collection of generically pretty scenes that all feature pretty performers thinking about love, talking about, and making love.  Recent high school graduates David (Alex Pettyfer) and Jade (Gabriella Wilde) start going out.  Jade comes from a wealthy family.  David does not.  Jade’s overly protective father, Hugh (Bruce Greenwood), does not approve of the relationship because Jade has an ivy league future ahead of her while David has no plans to attend college at all.  Jade becomes more rebellious.  David lectures Hugh on the fact that nothing is more important than love.  Hugh takes out a restraining order against David.  Jade goes off to college.  David tries to secretly see her.  And, of course, there’s a fire.

(Though, unlike in the original Endless Love, the fire is not deliberately set.  This is Endless Love  reimagined as a Nicholas Sparks novel.)

And who really cares?

The problem with Endless Love is that we’re supposed to care about David and Jade and we’re supposed love how obsessed they are with each other but David and Jade are two of the most boring people ever so who cares?  Alex Pettyfer is nice to look at.  Gabriella Wilde is pretty.  But, as a couple, they have next to no chemistry.  Instead, they come across like one of those vapid couples that my boyfriend and I always worry we’re going to end up getting trapped in an endless conversation with.

(“How did you two meet?  Wait, before you start — let me tell you how we met… It’s a great story…you guys are going to love this…we were both attending kindergarten on a dance scholarship but the ballet kids all hated the ballroom kids.  Then they moved to Iceland and I asked my dad if we could move to Greenland and then…”)

And again, this just shows the power of a good trailer.  Watching the trailer, you would never guess how boring David and Jade truly are.  Incidentally, the best parts of the trailer are all taken from a “David and Jade dating” montage that occurs about halfway through the film.  As such, the scenes that made me want to see Endless Love pretty much just serve as filler in the actual film.

Also, Florence + The Machine are nowhere to be heard in the actual film.  And their haunting, atmospheric music would have been out of place anyway.  Florence + The Machine embraces the power of ambiguity and Endless Love takes place in a world where there is no ambiguity.

However, there is a lot of blue.

Seriously!  (And yes, I do realize that there’s a typo in my tweet but everyone is allowed to be illiterate on twitter so get off my back.)  This movie opens with a high school graduation where everyone is wearing a blue robe and the entire cast is so oppressively cheerful and overwhelmingly pleasant-looking that I briefly wondered if they were supposed to be a graduating class or a cult.  Later on, David works at a valet at a country club and, of course, he wears a blue shirt.  Everyone who belongs to the club also appears to be wearing a blue shirt, except that it’s a lighter shade of blue than David’s blue.  It’s just odd-looking and reinforces the feeling that Endless Love is less a movie and more a collection of commercial outtakes.

Endless Love, of course, is a remake of a film from the early 80s.  The first Endless Love isn’t very good but it’s at least a lot of unintentional fun!  And you can read my review of it (and even watch the film!) by clicking here.