Long, bumpy ‘Ride’
Memo to young actors: Get your Nicholas Sparks movie out of the way early, as Scott Eastwood and Britt Robertson have in the groaner “The Longest Ride.” It only gets tougher as you get older.
The young performers survive the latest Sparks tearjerker with minimal embarrassment. That wasn’t so for James Marsden and Michelle Monaghan in “The Best of Me,” Josh Duhamel in “Safe Haven” or Amanda Seyfried in “Dear John,” all of whom were well-known before fulfilling their Sparks requirement.
Sophia (Robertson) is a college student studying art in North Carolina. She meets Luke (Eastwood) after seeing him bull-ride at a rodeo (where he gave her his hat, the big lug!). Bull-ridin’, Luke drawls, is all he knows — and he’s obsessed with winning after a bad throw from a bronco. Sophia, a Jersey girl in the South, is hesitant. Will their heat cool due to a clash of cultures?
Luke is a guy who brings flowers when he picks Sophia up at her sorority, picks up the check at dinner and picks up an old man after saving him from a burning car. That’s Ira, (Alan Alda, always welcome). Sophia visits Ira as he recovers in the hospital, reading to him the love letters he wrote to his late wife, Ruth. From Ira, Sophia learns that “love means sacrifice” and other aphorisms plucked from greeting cards. Guess who’s going to get another chance for her heart, right after he goes a winning eight seconds on an aggravated animal?
Sparks’ obsession with young and old couples — and interlocking pieces of hokey narrative conceit — is strained. Even if you found “The Notebook,” the arguable high-watermark of these things, to be mawkish pap, that story’s “Oh my God it’s them!” revelation seems inspired compared with everything that’s come since.
Eastwood and Robertson do their best, but can’t defeat mysterious illnesses, dewy flashbacks (which here seem especially incongruous) and swims in lilypad-filled lakes. If this is your particular poison, it won’t kill you. But anyone averse to Sparks’ sappy touch may get sick from all the bull.