“Endless Love” (Trailer) is another 1980s movie remake coming out this Valentine’s Day weekend. Unlike “About Last Night” and “RoboCop,” however, I never saw the original.

This allowed me to come into this movie with a completely open mind. From the trailer, it looks like it is going to go super serious with it all. I actually liked the trailer, using a slower version of “Addicted To Love.” From the way it is set up, I am almost certain someone is going to die by the end of the movie. Someone has to, right?

The Butterfield family is the cream of the crop in this small town. Its fortune simply came from being in a long line of doctors. Unfortunately, the eldest child, Chris, died of cancer before he could go off to college and carry on the family legacy. Now it is up to Jade (Gabriella Wilde) to kick butt in high school and get into Brown University. So she does that, but through the sadness of her brother’s death and focusing on grades, she never really made any friends, had boyfriends or lived life at all.

But then there is David (Alex Pettyfer), who has liked her for years but never talked to her for some reason. Well, now that she is about to leave for an internship, it seems like a good time to talk to her.

After a few romantic gestures, she falls hard for him, maybe just because someone else is finally nice to her.

Unfortunately, he has no college aspirations and is not rich, so her dad (Bruce Greenwood) hates him, despite her mother (Joely Richardson) and other brother (Rhys Wakefield) totally thinking he is awesome.

Blah blah, blah blah, forbidden love, fleeting lust and maybe someone dies.

Robert Patrick plays David’s father, and Dayo Okeniyi plays his best friend.

“Endless Love” might have had the chance to be a good story. It could have been kind of great. But it never really elevated out of poorly acted drama and never in any way felt believable.

It is a travesty that love is even in the film title when this is one of the most obvious cases of lust getting out of hand that I have ever seen. Arguably, that could be the point of the movie. The teens feel like it is a great love, when really, they have known each for about a week. But that “moral” was never really explored at all by the end, so I would have a hard time arguing for it. No, we just have two teenagers overreacting, and then they overreact even more, like an exponential function. 

The melodrama was high with this movie — maybe even over 9,000 units of melodrama.

I might have rated it higher, if the ending was not so cheesy and bad. I felt like nothing was really gained or learned by the characters, outside of the normal “teehee, love!” bullcrap that romance novels try to portray. I would like to say I am romantic person and generally will rate romances or rom coms pretty high, but this one could never stick.

Just so we are clear, I am saying something like “About Time,” a romance movie about time travel, is more realistic than “Endless Love” in basically every aspect. That is how fake everything felt to me.  

2/5