The Longest Ride review: Sparks don’t fly in this latest cornball atrocity

Here's something you don't see every day: a movie starring Clint Eastwood's son, John Huston's grandson and Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter. If all goes well, it will have the thrills of Dirty Harry, the humour of The African Queen and the poignancy of City Lights.

Oh dear. It seems as if The Longest Ride is the latest adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks atrocity. You know what that means. It has the thrills of The Bridges of Madison Country, the humour of Escape to Victory and the poignancy of, erm, whatever Charlie Chaplin's least poignant film is.

It would not be fair to suggest that Mr Sparks has only one plot. He has as many as three, but he's got a favourite to which he keeps loyally returning. As in The Notebook and that one with James Marsden, The Longest Ride switches between a romance in the present and a parallel relationship in the past.

Scott Eastwood plays a professional bull rider who, while recovering from a particularly brutal debulling, meets up with a fine arts student played by Britt Roberston (whose family have no apparent connection to Hollywood’s golden age).

Driving home from a fling, they encounter an elderly man (Alan Alda) in a burning car. As he is pulled from the vehicle, the geezer gestures towards a box, which, as students of Sparksiana won’t need to be told, contains letters that bring us back to an earlier romance in a simpler time.

Where to begin with this terrible, terrible film? With the bull-riding, small town romance and country music, the project is, as with all Sparks’s work, so soaked in Americana you feel as if you’ve been repeatedly vomited upon by a bald eagle. Mind you, he has, on this occasion, moved away from the Wasp world to include some more exotic immigrants.

Jack Huston and Oona Chaplin play the old man and his girlfriend as kids. Whether you can buy these two as east European Jews depends largely upon your capacity for creative self-deception. The strategy of relating their story through letters is hampered by its requirement for the characters to endlessly tell each other stuff they already know.

Oh, and there's the title. This may, of course, be a problem only in Ireland. But they may as well have called it The Biggest Mickey. Sorry.

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