‘The Longest Ride’
Grade: B-
In “The Longest Ride,” Nicholas Sparks goes country.
Two near-opposite people, a professional bull rider and a college girl from Jersey, begin a passionate and fraught love affair.
A second-semester senior, Sophia Danko, played by Britt Robertson, is set to start an internship at a New York art gallery within two months. Luke Collins, played by Scott Eastwood, won’t give up bull riding until he’s the best despite, and because of, an almost fatal head injury suffered the year before.
He doesn’t understand art or wear suits. She’s reluctant to wear cowgirl boots and isn’t used to his southern gentleman charms. It’s like Romeo and Juliet on a farm.
Meanwhile, the couple is inspired by the story of an elderly man, who they save from a car wreck. Ira Levinson, played by Alan Alda, reminisces on his courtship and marriage to his late wife, Ruth, during the 1940s.
It’s a love story within a love story. Or a Sparks-ception, if you will.
After all, Sparks is basically his own genre now. The movie was typical of a Sparks film, complete with a military man, letters, death and/or sickness, a hunky male lead and a beautiful, impassioned female lead.
Beyond the fact that there were many similar elements in “The Longest Ride” as there were in other Spark movies, the screenplay was poorly written.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the acting is good when the writing is bad, but all of the actors portrayed their roles well.
There was an overarching message of the film that love always involves sacrifices. These are the words Ira tells Sophia when recounting his love story.
There are sacrifices in each couples’ story, but in typical Sparks fashion, the sacrifices are made only by the women.
In Ira and Ruth’s case, Ira doesn’t really have anything to sacrifice that would help their relationship. He lets her leave when she’s unhappy, but she comes back days later.
Luke, on the other hand, has so much he could sacrifice in order to keep him and Sophia together. He could quit bull riding. He could move to New York. Yet he gets what he wants in the end without really giving up his dreams.
It’s a mold that has shaped many Sparks movies, and “The Longest Ride” didn’t break from it.
