14 DAY TRIAL // Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, two of the most solid and bankable actors of the day, are back together onscreen in the rom-com / dramedy / satire “Love & Other Drugs,” out in theaters in the US now.
After a very sensational promo campaign, conducted in the same vein as one of the official posters of the film – meaning with pics of the two stars in intimate situations –, it’s understandable why hype has built up so fast.
However, it may all have been a tempest in a teacup because the film doesn’t really live up to the pre-release buzz, the first reviews are saying.
While most critics agree that the performances by Gyllenhaal and Hathaway are superb, mostly because they already have good chemistry and experience of working together, they are basically wasted because the film is a “mess.”
It’s not the director’s fault, either, esteemed film critic Roger Ebert argues. The film fails because its script is messy and, while it manages to successfully move away from rom-coms and introduce well defined characters, it’s a construction so complicated that crashes in the end because of its own weight.
“The director is Edward Zwick, a considerable filmmaker. He’s essentially working with a screenplay (by Charles Randolph, Marshall Herskovitz and himself) that doesn’t work,” Ebert writes.
E! Online agrees, while also crediting the two actors for making quite a splash with their performances as two young people who discover love – and decide to play it all on that one card, their romance.
“Ridiculously beautiful commitment-phobes (Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway) suffer serious side effects from a love interaction. At first sight, Love appears to be this year’s Up in the Air, but then it strictly follows the rom-com prescription and comes dangerously close to OD’ing on sap,” the E! review reads.
Claudia Puig of USA Today also notes how great the two leads are in “Love & Other Drugs,” while stressing that perhaps it fails precisely because it was so ambitious from the start, it aimed to tell too many stories by including various plots.
“Hathaway and Gyllenhaal burn bright with passion, physical and verbal. They manage to come off as engaging even when the plot turns formulaic, insisting on forced obstacles, contrived separation and predictable scenarios. Both look fantastic — and there’s a lot to see,” Puig writes.
“Love & Other Drugs” is running in US theaters since yesterday, November 24. It is currently ranked 40 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes by Top Critics.