Endless Love gets parental as anything: boy meets girl, dad goes nuts

ALL that glitters is guilty-pleasure gold in Endless Love.

ENDLESS LOVE [M]

RATING: 3 STARS

Director: Shana Feste (Country Strong)

Starring: Gabriella Wilde, Alex Pettyfer, Bruce Greenwood, Joely Richardson, Rhys Wakefield

All that glitters is guilty-pleasure gold in Endless Love.

Not so much a remake as a kooky cover version of the tragically trashy 1981 romantic drama starring Brooke Shields, this is undoubtedly the best so-bad-it’s-good offering to happen along in yonks.

Though the acting always teeters on the brink of terrible and you’d think twice about lining a budgie cage with pages from the screenplay, there is something tremendously entertaining about the experience that never quite wears off.

Gabriella Wilde (the young girl with a conscience in Carrie) and Alex Pettyfer (the young guy in a G-string in Magic Mike) play the blah-crossed lovers of this torridly tangled tale of woe.

Endless Love ... A kooky cover version of the original.

Rich girl Jade (Wilde) will soon be going to college. Poor boy David (Pettyfer) will soon be starting work in his dad’s garage.

Their eyes meet across a crowded graduation ceremony. A summer romance to trump all summer romances begins, right? Wrong. Enter Jade’s psychotically snobby old man, Hugh (Bruce Greenwood). Not surprisingly, he’s not about to wait out the holidays for this David thing to blow over. He wants his privileged daughter’s economically-challenged boyfriend to go back to the wrong side of the tracks straight away.

Endless Love stars Alex Pettyfer and Gabriella Wilde.

Courtesy of a scenery-shredding performance from Greenwood, Hugh pushes the bad-dad-ness up to insane levels throughout the movie.

One minute he’s running sneaky background checks on the kid he hates so much. The next, he’s filing restraining orders, and irreparably tainting David’s future job prospects. Let’s not even go near the fire that starts at someone’s house in the dead of night.

Wilde and Pettyfer form an attractive enough coupling in spite of failing to truly click, but it doesn’t really matter. Just maintain focus on the antics of that father from hell, and you’ll warm to the selective charms of this cartoonish calamity in no time.