Written by Adam Mast
The Longest Ride (PG-13)
Let me preface this review by saying I don’t hate romance movies. Heck, I even liked a couple of movies based on Nicholas Sparks books (I thought “The Notebook” and “Dear John” were both pretty good). Having said that, I didn’t care much for “The Longest Ride,” a cloying, artificial movie that, at a whopping two hours and ten minutes long, more than earns its title.
In this latest Sparks adaptation, Britt Robertson plays bubbly college student Sophia Danko, and Scott Eastwood is Luke Collins, the dreamy bull rider she takes a liking to. While Sophia and Luke bond famously after a brief but seemingly meaningful courtship, it is clear that they are cut from a different cloth. She’s a big city arts aficionado, and he is a country boy with aspirations of hitting it big on the rodeo circuit. Still, they try to make a go of the relationship.
On their way home from a date one evening, Luke rescues the elderly Ira Levinson (played by Alan Alda) from a car wreck. Sophia opts to sit by Ira’s side in the hospital and immediately takes a liking to the unconscious stranger after finding and reading a letter he wrote to his wife years earlier. As it turns out, there are plenty more letters where that one came from, and once Ira awakens, he convinces Sophia to read the letters aloud to him. What follows is a film that alternates between two different timelines by way of two very familiar stories.
Essentially, “The Longest Ride” is two movies in one. It’s “Notebook Mountain” if you will. I wish I could say both stories were equally interesting but clearly, Ira’s tale from the past is considerably more tolerable then the Sophia/Luke love story, mostly because Jack Huston and Oona Chaplin as the younger Levinsons are able to convey more emotion. Robertson is fine as sweet-natured and inquisitive Sophia, but handsome Eastwood (son of Clint) is a bit of a blank as the chivalrous Luke.
“The Longest Ride” was directed by George Tillman Jr. (of the underappreciated “Men of Honor”) and while this one is well intentioned, unabashedly old fashioned, and well acted for the most part, the film as a whole is too schmaltzy and too cute for its own good. It certainly could have used a little more grit to amp up the drama. There is a pretty good bull riding sequence in the final act, but it arrives far too late.
There are a couple of moments throughout “The Longest Ride” that do manage to resonate, including one that suggests a neglected child’s life can be profoundly altered by way of the smallest gesture of love and kindness. However, too often “The Longest Ride” slips into the stagnant confines of artificial scenarios that only seem to exist in really cheesy movies.
As a film about rodeo life, “The Longest Ride” has nothing on “8 Seconds,” and as a meditation on love, life, sacrifice, and selflessness, it can’t hold a candle to the first 10 minutes of “Up,” an animated tour de force that manages to be more poignant, heartfelt, and authentic then anything in this picture.
While the love story between young Ira and his soul mate Ruth offers stretches of genuine emotion, the union between Sophia and Luke is about as romantic as the so-called love story between Anastasia and Christian in “50 Shades of Grey”…minus the whips, of course.
I hate to sound like an insensitive, heartless cynic, but as far as romantic movies go, I would not rank “The Longest Ride” anywhere near the top of the list. I’m sure there’s an audience for this movie, but clearly, I’m not it.
