‘The Longest Ride’ will please its target audience – and no one else

I can’t be the only one tempted to write Nicholas Sparks and beg him to stop. I mean, how many cliches can one man write in his lifetime? But to add salt to that wound, it seems every predictable concoction this man creates is making its way to the big screen, devoid of even the slight pleasure the books brought to the table.

I can deal with the romance novel genre and its cookie-cutter-ness; what I can’t abide by, however, is sitting through a watered-downed, unsatisfying and overly predictable romance novel-turned-movie. Which, in effect, is “The Longest Ride,” the latest Sparks novel to be made into a motion pictures that takes entirely far too long to say what it has to say only for it to say exactly what we thought it was going to say anyways.

When it comes down to it, “The Longest Ride” takes the best part of any Sparks novel — the intricate details he lavishes on his characters — and decides to just toss that in the trash. So what we’re left is paper-thin characters who draw no sympathy for this First World problems, paired with terrible dialogue, acting and narrative construction/progression. Even with all that sports-related action (obviously meant to wake those who had fallen asleep by this point), there’s little here to justify its two-hour runtime.

The premise here is simple: As with any Sparks creation, we’re introduced to a boy and a girl who meet, fall in love and then struggle through their relationship to hopefully find that Happily Ever After. It’s a cliche-ridden adventure, but that’s OK for the most part. Again, this is a romance novel adaptation, and that sort of writing tends to produce the desired effect among its target audience. The problem here is that that particular style of writing doesn’t always translate well to the screen, and “The Longest Ride” fails to present any compelling story for its audience.

But lest you be disappointed, this time around there’s not just one love story, there’s two. (Note the sarcasm.) And typical for certain strains of the romance genre, one storyline is set in present day while the other takes place in the 1940s, with that story being explored as the contemporary leads read through a cache of old letter. (It’s a strange narration device I’m thinking probably works a lot better in print.) The masculinity in “The Longest Ride” centers around the bull-riding Luke Collins (Scott Eastwood), who is trying to make a comeback into professional rodeo after suffering a terribly injury. Of course, he falls in love in with art student Sophia Danko (Britt Robertson). The typical boy-meet-girl story unfolds from here, with the wrinkle being that Luke is all country boy while Sophia is all city girl. You can see the issue.

Eventually, the pair are introduced to Ira Levinson (Alan Alda), who they save after he crashes his car. It’s at this point that those old letters come into play, as Ira (played by Jack Huston in the flashbacks) wrote a bunch of letters to his future wife Ruth (Oona Chaplin), which follows with them also completing the boy-meets-girl story. But hey, we even get a World War II scene that involved an uncommon amount of trench warfare.

The idea here is that these two love stories are supposed to be interconnected and valued equally. In effect, that doesn’t work. There’s no interconnectivity between these two couples, and I fail to see how I’m supposed to care about any of them, much less both couples, just because they struggled through the same basic problems some 70 years apart. It doesn’t help that Ira and Ruth’s story is basically filler with littler true purpose. They’re barely developed as characters, which seems to be indicative of how this movie values its characters.

In the end, “The Longest Ride” is just that: a too-long borefest that tries to be too much and fails at every turn. It’s some weird amalgamation of a drama, romance and sports movie, which might work in different circumstances. Not so much here. Combine that with the overwhelming feeling that this movie is a tad anachronistic and that it never reaches that pinnacle of easy romance and heartbreaking drama, and you have yourself quite the bumpy ride.

One “Yes, that’s Clint Eastwood’s son” star out of five.

Following Silver Screening Reviews on Twitter or like us on Facebook.

“The Longest Ride” centers on the star-crossed love affair between Luke (Scott Eastwood), a former champion bull rider looking to make a comeback, and Sophia (Britt Robertson), a college student who is about to embark upon her dream job in New York City’s art world. (Photo credit: Michael Tackett/Twentieth Century Fox)