Shana Feste’s endlessly lame “Endless Love’’ remake turns the obsessive sexual heat way down from the infamous 1981 Brooke Shields vehicle — while also tossing out the tragedies of Scott Spencer’s acclaimed source novel (but keeping Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s original theme song).
Franco Zeffirelli’s operatic original is a pretty bad movie, but it did have a clear agenda: To exploit Shields’ notoriety as a teenage hottie, coming on the heels of “The Blue Lagoon.’’ The film’s brilliant tag line: “She is 15. He is 17. The love every parent fears.”
Shields actually was around 15 when she made the movie, and that (plus her then-ethereal beauty) drove the story of her liberal dad going ballistic when he discovered she was having sex with a high school senior (played by the hapless Martin Hewitt, who in no way was up to the demands of the role).
That approach clearly wasn’t going to work in today’s more politically correct world — at least not in a major studio release that tones down the R-rated hothouse sexuality of the 1981 edition to the more box-office friendly confines of a PG-13.
In this hackneyed update, both Jade (Gabriella Wilde) and David (Alex Pettyfer) are safely 17, and her cardiologist dad catches them exiting a closet following a brief smooch at a graduation party.
Dad (Bruce Greenwood, who does all of the dramatic heavy lifting, with a little help from Joely Richardson as his wife) is concerned about Jade’s infatuation with David because he’s from the wrong side of the tracks — a trope that had whiskers on it decades before 1981.
David, whose thwarted obsession with Jade tipped over into psychosis in Spencer’s novel and the earlier movie, here has a juvenile record because he beat up a man who was cuckolding his dad (Robert Patrick in a curly wig as an auto mechanic).
Indie director Feste — who traversed similar territory with far more bite in “The Greatest’’ — embraces the overused clichés of contemporary romantic drama, especially montages.
David and Jade remain pretty ciphers — American teenagers shakily impersonated by a pair of 24-year-old English actors in attractive Georgia settings that seem to have been dictated more by tax incentives than anything to do with the paper-thin narrative.
In both Spencer’s novel and the earlier film of “Endless Love,’’ David sets a fire that leads to an increasingly awful series of tragedies. It’s not really spoiling anything to report that in this low-stakes version, the fire is an accident that triggers a happy ending. Like I said, lame.