Reuniting Brokeback Mountain actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway on screen should be a cause for celebration; unfortunately, this woefully trite and boring film has sullied the occasion. Ostensibly based on Jamie Reidy’s nonfiction book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, this film is an adaptation in the very loosest sense of the word, with the screenwriters (director Edward Zwick, Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskovitz) turning the rise of big pharma companies into a romantic comedy.
Jamie Randall (Gyllenhaal) is a loveable rogue; good with ladies but bad at keeping a job. The underachiever in his family, he is convinced by his brother (Josh Gad) to take a position at Pfizer as a sales rep. Jamie is sent to Ohio where he must convince doctors to prescribe the depression drug Zoloft over Prozac. Jamie’s life takes a turn when he meets free spirit and Parkinson’s sufferer Maggie (Hathaway).
Set in the 90s around the time that Viagra was released on the market by Pfizer, Love and Other Drugs misses the mark on many counts. The filmmakers apparently deemed the real story of an overpaid, slacker drug rep in over-prescribed America as either too boring or too hard a sell. Instead, they (rather cynically) inject the Maggie character into the plot, hijacking a story worth telling and turning it into an unoriginal romance.
Gyllenhaal and Hathaway will leave this film unscathed because the likeable stars do a good job with what they have been given. The film basically asks them to be an attractive couple, which is what they do.Oliver Platt as Jamie’s mentor and Hank Azaria as a womanising doctor are shamefully underutilised in the film. In contrast Gad (who seems to have been hired as a Jonah Hill impersonator) is painfully overused as Jamie’s grotesque younger brother.
Lacking the sardonic wit or necessary bite to pull off a rom-com based in the world of pharmaceuticals, Love and Other Drugs is a very disappointing pill to swallow.
1.5/5
First Published in The Brag 13/12/2010
