MOVIE REVIEW: Side effects bring down Love and Other Drugs
by Megan Carroll
Just like the little blue pill that Love and Other Drugs revolves around, this movie has some disturbing side affects. This could have been an extremely interesting film about exposing the intense competition between pharmaceutical companies; it could have been a consummate love story, but it couldn’t be both so you walk away from this movie with a sense of annoyance, aggravation and loathing.
Director Edward Zwick tried very hard to make this film the next Up in the Air and failed miserably. The movie is based on a cocky pharmaceutical salesman Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) who tries to make his mark in the business while at the same time engaging in a no-strings-attached relationship with the extremely blunt Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway). The film is initially light and funny, and the audience spends a lot of its time wrapped up in the sheets with Jamie and Maggie – often gratuitously.
Of course, like most no-strings-attached relationships, their mutual commitment deepens and this is where the movie mutates into a serious drama with Maggie’s medical hardships and Jake’s reaction to it.
The topics that writer-director Edward Zwick and co-scripter Charles Randolph chose to discuss in this film were so deep and painful that it felt so wrong that they would try to return to the light and funny film that it was at the beginning. The prescribed romantic comedy trappings, like the awkward car chase and the idiotic brother (Josh Gad) who lives on his couch, don’t seem to have a purpose in the film except to overly layer it with more story lines and confuse the theatergoer.
I would not recommend this film to anyone, not even on DVD. If Zwick would have had a strong, clear vision from the beginning, he could have had an award-nominee film on his hands with such strong performances for Gyllenhaal and Hathaway, but unfortunately he could not decide and we are left with a film that makes you want to take drugs just to forget it. Missed opportunity.
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