The Longest Ride

(M) ★★½

Director: George Tillman Jr.

Cast: Britt Robertson, Scott Eastwood, Alan Alda, Jack Huston, Oona Chaplin.

"You're laugh now, but seriously, I've seen the mosquitoes here carry away a small child."

WHEN the name "Nicholas Sparks" appears on a movie poster, you know what you're in for.

It's going to be a romance. It's going to feature bad dialogue being said by incredibly attractive people destined to fall for each other. Its themes will involve love enduring against the odds. And there will more than likely be a scene where the main characters kiss in either the rain or a lake. Or both.

The only question that remains is where on the Sparks adaptation scale the film sits. Is it up there with the so-so Nights In Rodanthe, or in the middle with the highly over-rated and morally bankrupt The Notebook, or is it somewhere down the bottom near the abysmal The Best Of Me?

The Longest Ride is probably in that middle range. It's certainly not as bad as The Best Of Me and it shares some similarities with The Notebook.

But in terms of quality, it's more like Safe Haven in reverse. Safe Haven starts well and wins you over before ruining everything with the dumbest final act twist ever committed to celluloid - The Longest Ride starts poorly but slowly grows on you somewhat as its two stories intertwine, with the affection you'll feel for the stronger story slowly bleeding into the lesser one.

That lesser story involves rodeo star Luke (Scott "Son Of Clint" Eastwood) falling for bookish art student Sophia (Robertson). He's recently back in the saddle after a serious injury so he can save the family ranch; she's leaving for New York in two months and doesn't have time for a rural romance.

But during their first date they cross paths with Ira Levinson (Alda), an old man who recollects his relationship with his wife Ruth.


The hokey start is hard to get past, despite the best efforts of Robertson and Eastwood. We get a heavy dose of rodeo, bootscooting, cowboy hats and that terrible plastic type of country music as Sophia and Luke make doe eyes at each other and fumble with small talk.

Even as their relationship blossoms it's still not compelling viewing. "Every girl wants a cowboy," intones one character, and even as the reality of that situation - they have absolutely nothing in common and want completely different things in life - sinks in and the problems arise, the storyline is, to quote Lisa Simpson, kind of "meh".

It's the relationship between Ira and Ruth that is the saving grace of the film. As it unwinds in the '40s and '50s, the emotion and drama in that story actually makes Sophia and Luke's tale become more interesting by association, as well as giving the movie a serious helping of heart.

Alda's presence adds gravitas, the film is beautifully shot, and Eastwood is probably destined for stardom, but that's not enough to truly redeem The Longest Ride, possibly because the moral within, while not as bad as The Notebook's, is not very good.

As much as the movie is trying to tell us that true love endures and that it can overcome pretty much anything, its ending inadvertently adds the tag "... if you've got lots of money".

What the hell kind of romantic message is that?