Endless Love

The endless love in question unfolds in that universe where shy, bookish teenage girls are always catalog-model beautiful, not a pimple in sight or a pound overweight, not a garment from Hot Topic darkening their closets. The movie tells us that 17-year-old Jade Butterfield (Gabriella Wilde) is "awkward" and has no friends, but all expository evidence stops right there. She has just graduated from high school -- you know, the one with exactly two black students who date each other -- and is bound for the Ivy Leagues when lowly but popular son-of-an-auto-mechanic David Elliot (Alex Pettyfer, who would need to be five years younger and drastically beefed down to pass as a teenager) begins pursuing her with the immediate, freaky prowess of a guy who would intentionally poke holes in a condom. Granted, raw intensity is the point here, as it was in the 1981 Brooke Shields original. But at least the old one aimed to illustrate the destructive nature of untempered passion -- with an ultra-metaphorical house fire, no less. This film is a sunny, overlong pastiche of tropes, the kind that suggest love involves nothing more than holding hands or having slow, teary-eyed sex in front of a fireplace, inexplicably blazing in mid-June. We never hear the central couple have a conversation that's not centered on their unwarranted, histrionic love. And therein lies the kicker. They actually do make a good couple. Both Jade and David are searching for the blankest of all possible slates: a human void unmarred by personality onto which they can each project their weird possessive fantasies. They certainly find it in each other.