Love & Other Drugs (2010)'s comments

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JackieGigantic

I'm going to hit some of the good things about Love & Other Drugs out of the park before I leave us alone in a baseball diamond's worth of bad movie. The movie opens pretty strongly, a blend of Wall Street and American Psycho, but forsaking the 80's rise of the yuppies setting of the examples for the height of the pharmaceutical drug war in the mid-90's. Enter Jake Gylennhaal as Jamie Randall, a young, up-and-coming, clear-cut sociopath with a nose aimed so high up for success we just can't help but prepare out Icarus-ready eyes for a nosedive. Through sex and manipulation, our little corporate drug-pushed Jamie manages to get himself in good with a hedonistic man-child Doctor king whose perverse excess and apathy for the common man makes Wall Street's Gordon Gecko look like a charity worker.

Everything seems to be going good, but then something happens. This movie crashes head-first into an entirely different movie, some heart-warming piece of crap starring Anne Hathaway about living with Parkinson's. I'm pretty sure even she realizes she doesn't belong in this movie, because she half-assedly hams her way through it, although you DO get to see her tits an assload. Jamie, who the movie has just finished explaining is an amoral, misogynistic sociopath without feelings for anyone, pretty much falls in love with Hathaway's Maggie (yes, same name as Jake Gylennhaal's IRL sister, ew) instantly for pretty much no reason. And I really need to underline NO reason, here; Maggie is so whiny and abrasive Jamie might as be fucking a rabid shitzu, and serves zero - ZERO - purpose in a plot that somehow still revolves around her. She also doesn't want Jamie to love her because she thinks he is too cautious because of her Parkinson's, despite that it's clear Jamie probably doesn't even no what Parkinson's is considering how much of a non-issue it seems to be to him.

Then, about two-thirds into the movie, the film completely abandons (and I do mean completely, leaving total loose ends) what should have been the focus of the film: Jamie's career as a pharmaceutical drug-pusher, his relationship with Dr. No Soul, and his rivalry with a pimping fellow-pusher. See, suddenly Jamie decides he wants to find a cure for Parkinson's, and drags an unwilling Maggie around America searching for treatments with his brother who is doing such a precise rif of Seth Rogen you wonder why they just didn't get Seth Rogen. Actually, fuck that, his character is so out of place in this fucking movie you might as well scrap him completely - he seems to be from yet a THIRD movie which was caught in the great-film-collision that formed this abomination; some sort of gross-out sexed-up comedy romp for stoned college kids to giggle at.

People often make the, in my opinion, very trope statement that The Social Network "wasn't about Facebook". They're wrong, The Social Network is ALL about Facebook - Facebook serves as a metaphor for the senseless inhuman detachment that all the characters are experiencing, their distancing from each other and the world. The Social Network serves as not only a story of people, but a metaphor for the effect Facebook has had upon millions. In the same light, this movie should have been about Viagra - and it started out as a movie about Viagra. Fuck, the back of the movie says that this is a movie about the rise of Viagra - which is why it should have stuck with that. Become a movie about these pharmaceutical drug pushers "waving their dicks around", a movie about swagger and insecurity and hollow sex and emotional distance. This is what the title SHOULD be alluding to as opposed to some bland-ass rom-com - love as a sold commodity; a drug to be popped like a pill.

I give this movie a sad, purple quarter-erection out of one full, throbbing man-c*ck.

2.5/10.0

10 years 3 months ago