The critics have spoken and all of them agree: If you're going to spend eight bucks on a movie this weekend, it had better not be on The Longest Ride.
That it is a Nicholas Sparks adaptation simply says it all. Like nearly all the other nine Sparks love stories that have made it to the silver screen since 2002, The Longest Ride succeeds at creating a romantic drama so tediously formulaic and unbelievable, not even the copious views of actor Scott Eastwood's (son of Clint Eastwood) six-pack can save this movie from being two hours and 19 minutes of tear-jerking torture.
"Far be it [for] me to spoil a movie in a review, but 'The Longest Ride' is such junk that I don't care," says Jordan Hoffman of The Guardian.
Instead of asking what makes this movie different from its successors, it is better to ask what makes it exactly the same as previous films adapted from Sparks novels, including the box office toppers Dear John, Nights in Rodanthe, and The Last Song.
"Of course, you and I know the answer perfectly well - it involves kissing under a spray of water - though the events that reveal it are beyond ordinary powers of prediction," says A.O. Scott of the New York Times.
That and, of course, scenes of sunlight dappling the calm waters of a lake in North Carolina, old and feeble characters that churn out words of wisdom for the characters to process, and curtains flowing in the breeze when the lovers start to get frisky. Let's not forget the age-old prescription for the prim and proper and utterly blond art history major, played by Britt Robertson, falling for the muscular bull-rider who also happens to know how to set up a picnic table and call (not text) a girl to ask her out for a date.
"A weepless weeper, it depicts people speaking significant speeches, rather than having spontaneous conversations, and confirms to a timeworn, and shopworn, Sparks formula of troubled protagonists receiving wisdom, or inspiration, or both, from unexpected sources," says Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal.
On to the plot, the movie starts where boy (Luke) meets girl and girl (Sophia) meets boy and the two fall in love. Nothing remarkable there, but on their first date, they save 90-year-old Ira Levinson, played by Alan Alda, from a car accident. Luke takes him to the hospital and Sophia takes the box of old love letters Ira wrote to his wife, Ruth, when she was alive. Sophia brings the box to Ira and reads his letters to him, and a second love story played out by Hollywood royalty Jack Huston and Oona Chaplin unfolds.
Nothing much really happens, though. Sophia wants Luke to stop his bull-riding, but Luke wants to continue to help save his family's farm after his father died. In an impassioned, snigger-worthy speech, Luke's mom tells him: "It's eight seconds. This girl could be the rest of your life."
Meanwhile, Ira and Ruth's love story seems to offer more appeal, if only because it appears to be the real-life story of a real-life couple in New York City named Herb and Dorothy Vogel, as pointed out by Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times.
"Fans (or perhaps victims is a better term) of Nicholas Sparks films know that they're never complete without a wholly unpredictable twist at the end," says Hoffman at the end of his review. "'The Longest Ride' has one, too, and it elicited chuckles from the crowd, but it's of a fairly benign Scooby Doo quality. This is the film's grossest crime. It's dumb, it's long, it's dull, but it isn't quite bad enough to be camp."
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