Endless Love

He (Alex Pettyfer) is a square-jawed car mechanic who’s not going to college, she (Gabriella Wilde) is a lithe blonde goddess following her surgeon daddy to medical school. Thwarted romance looms in this remake of the 1981 Brooke Shields movie with the traumatic Lionel Richie-Diana Ross theme tune. The intended result is an American teen love story for a tweenie audience, with sexuality and drug use implied more than shown, though maybe the movie’s also banking on a demographic too young to spot the industrial-strength clichés throughout. Pettyfer and Wilde (both Brits) look the part in a soft-drinks-commercial way, but their characters might as well be called Ken and Barbie for all the depth they bring to this wish-fulfilment fantasy of social mobility. The desire of the young folk to live their own lives and their parents’ determination to stop them doing so provide a genuine basis for dramatic conflict, but the script is so howlingly awful that adult viewers will face a tough choice between writhing in pain or laughing out loud. Come back, Lionel and Diana – all is forgiven.