No need for spoiler-alert, you all know how this movie ends.
It has been a while since I’ve sat down with the purest intention to destroy a movie. It’s not that I want to be mean it’s just the matter of balance and after a while, when you have praised so many things, you just have to give yourself the opportunity to be negative. This is probably the reason why I watched The Longest Ride in the first place, to hate it and since it wasn’t hard to see through all those clichés, I really did end up hating it.
Nicholas Sparks is the godfather of romantic clichés and women eat it up like chocolate! I don’t know how he managed to stumble on such a goldmine but I have to give him credit, his writing it at least better than E.L. James with her series of horror books. Either way, Sparks has been writing and writing and everything he writes ends up as a movie. And I don’t necessarily hate his writing nor movies, there was A Walk to Remember which I love to this day, and well there’s the infamous Notebook to be considered. The problem is not his past work, it’s what follows his success and how he is able to milk the same stupid story over and over again. We get it, people fall in love and end up together and somebody always dies, fine, now show me something I haven’t seen!
The Longest Ride is about a couple, who meet right before Sophia (Britt Roberston) is about to leave town and Luke (Scott Eastwood) who is a bull rider with a death wish. It’s tragic and then it’s not, but I guess you would know what happens in the end even if I didn’t tell you. Anyway, they save an old man from a car crash, the car of course explodes!, but not before Sophia is able to pull out the old man’s box of letters. Enter the flashback movie intertwined with the present time movie and we have ourselves a budget Notebook – shorter, less intriguing and both are dead by the end credits. The sad thing is, I actually ended up liking the past-movie more than the present one because god forbid, is Britt Robertson ever going to have chemistry with her costar or what?
For some reason I’ve never really liked Robertson but in The Longest Ride she became even more annoying. Maybe it was Scott Eastwood and his lack of appeal that emphasized this discomfort in me but I did not like their combined performance at all. It was the past-performance that caught my eye, where Jack Huston and Oona Chaplin whose portrayal of Ira and Ruth was devastatingly beautiful. Their struggles were actually interesting and I would have loved to have seen more of their story which was probably why I was even more frustrated about the present-affair.
Bottom line, I’m tired of Sparks and his unstoppable ability to milk the same story over and over again. I’m also a little bit shocked that I’m not able to see the appeal of Scott Eastwood – I mean, I think he could be attractive from some angles but for The Longest Ride to work for me, I needed some steam! Or at least some sizzling which would probably have made me a little less grumpy about the movie. Yes, that’s it, I’ve discovered the main reason The Longest Ride felt like the longest movie – no sex appeal! And call me shallow, but if I’m going to watch a romantic movie, at least give me some hot stuff on a stick so I could enjoy the damn ride!
METTEL RAY 
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