Nicholas Sparks' movies are almost always seemingly made to please the hopeless romantics and the fairytale romance-loving audience, they're expected to manipulate emotions, no matter how extremely recognizable their set ups may be, and they often triumph. But in THE LONGEST RIDE, the attempt barely mimics such success, primarily because of its confusing and ever shifting narrative, whose backbone runs on two romantic sagas spanning across different generations.
THE LONGEST RIDE sprawls across two love stories set in the modern day and seventy years ago. In modern day, it has Luke and Sophia, two utterly good-looking people, who at first sight falls in love with each other, they stumbles upon Ira, a World War II veteran, who himself, has his own epic love story to tell—that one he shared with his wife, Ruth, seventy years ago. More often, these two love stories bear no difference from each other, as both couples go through similar hardships to carry their relationships.
The idea of crisscrossing time to present two supposedly compelling love stories, perhaps, is to double the magnitude of emotions and deliver a more poignant result, yet such very confusing structure is what actually makes giving both the stories with equal level of sentiment, difficult. Still, no matter how one appears to hold more promise of an engaging love story than the other, the tedious and confusing process of going back and forth across two different time frames, and the fact that the narrative failed to establish concrete connection between the two stories, renders less than satisfying result. There's also this chemistry that Luke and Sophia seem to be lacking, regardless of how incredibly beautiful they are as persons, and that, may also be the reason why the other story, strikes as more riveting than theirs. This makes the entirety of the movie—its interesting premise and structure yet often convoluted, and its thinly drawn characters—hard to appreciate and care about. Nevertheless, in the eyes of a true Sparks' fan, and of anyone easily drawn to such anthems, THE LONGEST RIDE easily serves its purpose.
Spanning through generations and intertwining love affairs, THE LONGESTh RIDE would have been more satisfying had it treated both the stories with equal attention. That's not to say it has no small moments of perfection, because it does, but as a whole, the movie just falls below average.
