Love and Other Drugs Not So Potent

Love and Other Drugs—with Jake Gyllenhaal playing a Viagra salesman who falls for Anne Hathaway's character—has a lot to offer, but critics can’t prescribe it without a few caveats. (It has a 38% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, though audiences give it a solid 70% approval mark):

• The film “almost works, sustaining its blend of melodrama, low comedy and graceful wit for a good hour or so,” writes A.O. Scott in the New York Times. But it’s “treacle, evasion and maudlin convention at the end."

• Director Ed Zwick is “essentially working with a screenplay that doesn’t work,” notes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Given that problem, you have to observe that he is a capable filmmaker even in bad weather.”
• But Betsy Sharkey, writing in the Los Angeles Times, is won over. “Finally, after years of suffering through Hollywood's predictable pap, sentimental mush, boring bromances and mean girl clichés, comes a love story that is actually worth falling for.”

(More movie review stories.)