This year, I'm gonna try to offset all the good movies I watch with some awful ones. You've already seen what I had to say about Winter's Tale, and almost right after I chose to watch this. This... was a painful experience from start to finish.
Endless Love is an "adaptation" of a novel of the same name, except that I'm fairly certain this is an original screenplay. Everything I've heard says that this is an offensively inaccurate representation of the book. In and of itself, this should be a red flag for this film. But, maybe some people haven't read Endless Love. In which case, still don't watch this film.
The fact that Endless Love's title was used for this film shows that there was something compelling about the so-called source material, which makes it a bit offensive that this film is such a shallow, trite experience. I'd call the screenplay original, except the sheer quantity of cliches present would make that an inaccurate statement. Reading the plot summary is something like a list of romance movie cliches, which is quite possibly one of the absolute most damning things that can be said about an adaptation. Really? They reduced a book that clearly people liked enough to adapt into this? That's appalling.
Worse still, a lot of the cliches that they picked are scraped from the very bottom of the cliche barrel. This is a love story about two young lovers that are totally perfect for each other, but unfortunately the girl's dad is keeping them apart. It's an unhealthy love fantasy, and one that is so grounded in artifice that I can imagine actual couples, who had real ups and downs and good times, might be offended. But even by the low standards of the genre, the film seems to have no grounding in reality. I'm certain there were a large number of unrealistic moments in the film, but everything in it is so bland that I wasn't paying enough attention to notice.
I should point out as well that the characters have the personality of cardboard. The male love interest is just some perfect boy with a dark past, and everyone always talks about how great he is but the writers are too lazy to even give him a strong personality, let alone show us why some characters talk so fondly of him. The female lead has the same problems, but at least the film doesn't pretend there's something to her. On the other hand, you have the female lead's father, who serves as the main antagonist through a borderline psychotic hatred of the male lead. In this exaggerated hatred there may be some unintentional comedy to be found, but it's not much beyond the sheer banality.
I was hoping to get some anger out of watching bad films, and here I got it. This is agonizing. And the worst part is that all of this bland, trite, banal material goes on for eternity. The result is unwatchable. Don't bother.
2/10
Extended thoughts (warning: spoilers, not that it matters)
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