“The Longest Ride” is a Nicholas Sparks adaptation about two couples, two love stories, and one epic tale that never quite gets around to being either. Directed by George Tillman Jr. and written by Craig Bolotin, the film follows Luke Collins, a professional bull rider, and Sophia Danko, an art student at Wake Forest University, whose lives cross when Luke rescues an elderly man from a car crash. That man, Ira Levinson, has a box of letters he wrote to his dead wife, Ruth, and Sophia agrees to read them to him. The film then splits its time between Ira’s memories of Ruth, who loved him in 1940, and Luke and Sophia’s current romance, which struggles to survive the clash between Luke’s violent sport and Sophia’s artistic world.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
The Letters and the Crash
The setup is simple and potentially moving. Luke and Sophia attend a PBR event together, then drive home where they spot the wrecked car in the woods. They pull Ira from the burning vehicle and find the box of letters. In the hospital, Ira explains that the letters were what he wrote as a teenager to Ruth, who died years ago. Sophia reads them aloud, and through them we learn about Ruth and Ira’s courtship, their marriage, and the war that tore them apart.
The film’s tagline promises two love stories, but it delivers one story told twice. The past and present threads are meant to mirror each other, with Luke and Sophia’s problems echoing Ruth and Ira’s. But the mirroring never quite lands. Luke’s fear that his career will end and ruin his relationship is supposed to parallel Ira’s loss of fatherhood and Ruth’s grief over it. Instead, the parallels feel forced, repeated for their shape rather than their substance.
The Flashbacks and the War
The flashbacks are where the film tries hardest to earn its emotional weight. Young Ira, played by Jack Huston, falls in love with Young Ruth, played by Oona Chaplin, in 1940. She tells him she wants a big family, and he proposes before leaving to fight in World War II. In the war, Ira is shot and told he can no longer have children. This news drives a wedge between Ruth and Ira when he returns home.
The film handles the war sequence poorly. Ira’s injury is treated as a plot device rather than a wound with meaning. The news that he cannot have children is delivered as a twist, but it feels like a trick rather than a tragedy, because the film has spent little time establishing what Ruth and Ira’s childlessness would mean to them beyond the plot’s demands.
The Nursing Home and the Art Exhibit
As Ira grows older, he moves to a nursing home, and Sophia continues to visit him. Luke, meanwhile, pursues his bull riding career while falling in love with Sophia. Their relationship sputters when Luke attends an art exhibit with her and finds it uninteresting. He admits he doesn’t feel their relationship will work, and the film spends the rest of its runtime trying to convince him otherwise.
The exhibit scene is telling. Luke looks at paintings and sees nothing, while Sophia sees everything. The film’s point is that Luke’s world is closed, but the scene itself is closed too, a static tableau of two people talking past each other rather than engaging with each other.
The Ruth-Daniel Story
Ruth’s story takes an unexpected turn when she becomes attached to a young student named Daniel McDonald. She learns she and Ira cannot have children, and she and Ira want to adopt Daniel. But Daniel’s uncaring relatives won’t allow it. The subplot is meant to add depth to Ruth’s character, showing her maternal instincts and her loss. Instead, it feels like padding, a separate story tacked onto the main narrative without enough room to breathe.
The film doesn’t know what to do with this thread. It introduces Daniel, then drops him. The audience is left wondering why Ruth cared about him so much if he never appears again. The subplot raises questions it never answers, and that irresolution undercuts the emotional weight the film is reaching for.
The Final Stretch
Luke is injured while riding and rushed to the hospital. He is advised not to ride again, but he refuses to accept that his career is over. The film’s climax is supposed to bring Luke and Sophia back together by forcing Luke to choose between his sport and her. But the choice is never really in question. The film has spent so long telling us Luke will lose everything that his refusal to accept it feels less like a decision and more like a shrug.
The final stretch also includes a subplot involving Ira’s mother, played by Kate Forbes, and a rodeo girl/dancer, played by Hayley Lovitt. These characters exist to populate the background, but they never become people. The film is so busy moving pieces around that it forgets to make any of them matter.
“Two couples. Two love stories. One epic tale.”
That tagline is the film’s mission statement, and it fails to deliver on all three counts. There are two couples, but only one story gets told with care. The other couple, Luke and Sophia, is given a romance that feels like a placeholder for the real story. The film’s attempt to link the two timelines through parallel imagery and similar themes collapses under the weight of its own repetition. The result is a movie that feels like two separate films stuck together with glue that doesn’t hold.
The Numbers
- Director: George Tillman Jr.
- Writer: Craig Bolotin
- Release date: April 10, 2015
- Studio: 20th Century Fox
- Runtime: 128 minutes
- Score: 3.3/10
The cast is capable. Britt Robertson and Scott Eastwood are pleasant leads, and Alan Alda brings real presence to Ira. Jack Huston and Oona Chaplin do good work in their smaller roles. But the script doesn’t give them much to work with. The supporting cast, including Melissa Benoist, Lolita Davidovich, and Elea Oberon, fill out the world without adding much to it.
The film’s technical elements are serviceable. The photography is clean, the editing is smooth, and the score swells at the right moments. None of it rises above the material. The film is competently made but never compelling.
What “The Longest Ride” lacks is a sense of stakes. Ruth and Ira’s story is about a marriage tested by war and infertility, but the film never lets us feel what those losses mean. Luke and Sophia’s story is about a relationship tested by career and culture, but the film never lets us feel what that difference means. The film is full of emotion, but it never lets the emotion land.
The film’s worst flaw is its inability to commit to its own tone. It wants to be a weepy romance, a war story, and a coming-of-age tale all at once. It ends up being none of them convincingly. The result is a film that is neither here nor there, a story that promises depth and delivers repetition.
“The Longest Ride” is a film that mistakes sentiment for feeling. It is earnest without being honest, and it is honest without being earned. The Sparks formula is built on a foundation of reliable emotional payoff, and this adaptation never builds that foundation. It tells the same story twice and hopes that repetition will stand in for craft.
The film’s failure is structural. It has a premise that could support a moving drama, but it chooses to pad that premise with a second story that never earns its keep. The result is a film that is two hours longer than it should be and half as moving as it could be.
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