The Longest Ride is the latest film from the famous love story novelist, Nicholas Sparks. This film comes directed by George Tillman Jr. who has worked on other films such as Men of Honor (2000) and Notorious (2009) in the past. The Longest Ride stars Britt Robertson, Oona Chaplin, Scott Eastwood, Alan Alda and Jack Huston.
The Longest Ride Trailer
The Longest Ride Review
The Longest Ride follows the story of a young couple who have just met and fallen in love. One is an aspiring art student named Sophia (Britt Robertson) and the other is cow boy Luke Collins (Scott Eastwood), who is striving to be the best bull rider in the world. When travelling home from one of their first dates they stumble upon a car crash and rescue an old man named Alan (Ira Levinson), just before his car explodes. Alan has a basket full of love letters and as he can’t read because he is too old, Sophia reads them for him and we hear the story of his love life. We also watch Sophia and and Luke as their relationship develops.
If you want to see a movie with almost every single love story cliché that you have seen many times before, then The Longest Ride is the film for you. The film while okay in theory just doesn’t really become anything by the end of it all and the characters are lame and awkward the whole way through.
The two lead actors while okay overall don’t seem to me to have much in common at all and their on screen chemistry doesn’t seem good enough for the type of love they are supposed to be experiencing. In my view this is most likely due to the directing from George Tillman Jr. who chose to fill the most pivotal points of the film with musical montages that don’t really go anywhere other than to suggest the love the characters have for each other.
We as an audience are supposed to feel for Luke’s character who is trying to reach the number one spot in the world for bull riding. While there is some character development for this, it’s entirely predictable and by the end you know exactly what he is going to do. There’s no mystery in The Longest Ride or anything that can keep the audience guessing at all.
In this film which is similar to the last Nicholas Sparks film, The Best Of Me. We watch two separate couples characters love lives develop and are told simultaneous stories at once. We have to listen to old man Alan all the way through this film read about his love life and all the drama’s he had with his girlfriend and wife, Marcia (Oona Chaplin). It felt as if the words he was saying are meant to have a great emotional impact on the audience but really there was none. The tone of the film is set to try really hard to make you feel for the characters and maybe make some people cry at certain plot points but it feels so forced that it just doesn’t come together at all. Last year’s film The Best Of Me, which had its own problems is the better viewing choice. But for Nicholas Sparks fans his earlier films like A Walk to Remember or The Notebook are far greater films compared to these two recent ones.
While I can’t be certain if the book is good or not as I haven’t read it, I would suggest that it may be a much better thing to spend time on than watching this movie. The Longest Ride felt so forced and so pressured to be something great and it just never gets there. In the cinema I was in, people were constantly leaving to go to the bathroom and returning to their seats at such a rate that one could start to wonder if something more interesting was happening in the hall ways outside than on the screen in The Longest Ride.
Overall The Longest Ride was just filled with love story cliché’s and a forced tone that doesn’t turn out well as an overall film experience. It’s a very difficult film to recommend someone to go and see unless you are a major fan of these types of films. I would have to say it might be best to give it a miss and maybe save your money for the following weeks movie outings.
