K-SCORE: 29
Director: Edward Zwick
Based on: Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman by Jamie Reidy
Screenplay by: Three people that aren’t Jamie Reidy
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway
Spoiler Level: Moderate
Good luck swallowing Love and Other Drugs.
In it Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Jamie, spends about an hour and ten minutes being an insufferable douchebag, mistreating women and cheating to get ahead at his job as a drug pusher for Zoloft and Viagra. I find it's best for patient care to have doctors deciding which drugs to prescribe based on which pharmaceutical rep gives them the most free stuff.
As you’re having fun with that, he and Anne Hathaway’s character, Maggie, (SOOO creepy that Jake Gyllenhaal’s love interest and the character he’s semi-explicitly having sex with throughout the whole film is named “Maggie”) develop a friends-with-benefits relationship that turns to love. No one’s seen that before. Only their relationship doesn’t have much zest to it beyond the physical; they fight when they’re not sleeping with each other. So all the inevitable perils that come later on leave viewers with the feeling that there’s not much reason for them to be staying together.
Maggie has Parkinson’s Disease, a fact casually addressed at the beginning, but a fact which the writer learned the hard way will completely overshadow all other aspects of the plot. Jake’s job at the pharmaceutical company they spend so much time on and Maggie’s odd job of ferrying old people to Canada for cheaper medications become irrelevant in the final forty minutes. By the end the only question is: is Jake Gyllenhaal a good enough man to be with Parkinson’s riddled Maggie when her disease reaches advanced stages? He has doubts, meets some husbands of older Parkinson’s patients that scare him, and ultimately decides he is. But I wasn’t convinced. I assume that shortly after the credits roll, when the meaningful conflict begins, our hero cuts and runs leaving Maggie both sick and heartbroken.
Jake and Maggie - unrelated...
Love and Other Drugs is a rom com filled with cliches and needless filler, periodically selling itself with Hathaway’s nakedness in much the same style Jake - I mean Jamie - sells viagra. It pretends to offer a deeper plot than it’s capable of delivering, ultimately failing in being very romantic, dramatic, or funny.