Good things: Well the acting was great, especially by Anne Hathaway, who plays Maggie Murdock, and Oliver Platt, who plays Gyllenhaal's sales partner and sort of mentor, Bruce. Gyllenhaal, as Jamie Randall, was good too, but how hard can it be to play a shallow ladies' man? There were also some touching scenes with great emotion where Hathaway is dealing with having stage one Parkinson's disease at 26 years old, as well as entertaining scenes when Gyllenhaal is selling the Viagra wonder drug, dancing around medical offices throwing around samples, with classic 90's music playing in the background (as the movie takes place in 1996 when Viagra first emerged onto the scene).
Not so good things: All of the unnecessary sex scenes got annoying after a while. It felt like they just wanted to fill in the gaps where the script was lacking so they kept throwing in sex scenes. I'm okay with sex scenes as long as it is relevant to the film and is nicely done. This was not the case with Love and Other Drugs. Also, I believe they could have cut out the entire character that was Jamie's brother, because everything his character did was crude, sexual and unfortunately not even funny. One scene in particular was just painful to watch. It involved Jamie's brother watching a sex tape made by Jamie and Maggie and then Jamie catching him in the act. Seriously? How am I suppose to take the movie seriously after that? All of the extra, unneeded crap they put into this movie only hinders viewers from sympathizing with the characters and takes away from the integrity of the film. I suppose they think that this is the kind of stuff we want to see in a movie, but not me. And I suspect not most people. Finally, one of the opening scenes in which Jamie is having dinner with his family was awful! They all don't get along so they start swearing at each other all at once. I think they meant it to be somewhat comedic, but it was so off rhythm that it came off as obnoxious and irritating. It was not a good way to start out the film. Bad vibes.
This movie had real potential and could have been done a lot better...sorry Zwick. I think mixing crude sexual humor with a dramatic love story will not give you a good result. And for the most part, people who like the dramatic, somewhat sappy love stories don't tend to like the toilet humor comedy movies, and vice versa. So, either way you're going to piss some people off. I hope this gives you a good sense of what this movie involves so that you aren't surprised by anything should you decide to see it.
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