From 30,000+ ft. on an airplane Wifi connection, here is a preview of a movie that opens nationally tomorrow, Safe Haven. It is the latest collaboration of prolific author Nicholas Sparks and acclaimed director, Lasse Hallstrom. Read (watch) it and weep.
Safe Haven (Josh Duhamel, Julianne Hough, Cobie Smulders, David Lyons) – Did the cinematic world really need another adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks’ tearjerker? Did I have to watch yet another country music singer (Julianne Hough this time vs. Miley Cyrus in the 2010 Sparks’ melodrama The Last Song) try to act in an overwrought seaside setting where someone has to die? Did acclaimed director Lasse Hallstrom really need the work that badly or did he have such a good time with Sparks’ Dear John that he just had to do another one?
These are the questions that scrolled through my otherwise bored mind during the film Safe Haven. Now you might ask: “Why would a famed movie critic like Cliff even see a chick flick Safe Haven?” Well, thanks our dear friends, Eric and Paula Book, who are among the most notable members of the San Diego Cinema Society, we got free tickets in a pre-release showing. I have always wanted to belong to this group because they often have celebrity guests, playwrights, directors and producers talk about their movies at these pre-opening events. But not this time! We just got the movie, billed as a “romance thriller.” Yes, it’s a romance. What Sparks’ book isn’t?
What a deception. As a thriller, it’s a predictable mess. I’m tempted to say that the only thrill was when the closing credits appeared. Okay, I will say it: “The only thrill came as the closing credits appeared.” All of the other tense moments came with plenty of warning (but even I won’t give them away).
Save Haven features hunk Josh Duhamel (Transformers, New Years Eve and TV’s All My Children, Las Vegas, Crossing Jordan) as Alex, a father of two who was recently widowed. Hough (a two-time winner of Dancing with the Stars no less) plays the ingénue Katie, a very cute, cleavage-laden woman with a past that no one in the North Carolina seaside town knows anything about. She arrives on a bus that stops by the town, and immediately feels at home. She meets Alex’s daughter in one of those “never really happens” moments. Then, she meets Alex, and we know at once that sex will ensue (off-camera, of course).
The courtship begins, the music weaves country and schmaltz, and then the “Sparks” begin to fly – figuratively and, later, literally. I’m not making this up. Of course, we need tension otherwise the story won’t last long enough to qualify as a movie. That means Katie’s past has to emerge in all of its gritty glory. That was foreshadowed in the best two minutes of the movie: the opening scenes and credits where we see this young woman running frantically from her house to her neighbor’s in a driving rainstorm one night. She hops a bus, eludes the police, and sets up the movie’s denouement (that’s French for not-so-thrilling conclusion). Will Alex save his daughter from death or save Katie from the bad guy (David Lyons, another in a series of unknown actors who plays a cop but has a dark side)?
Okay, the movie isn’t quite that bad. If you are a fan of Sparks, you will be satisfied. This is the movie equivalent of a “quickie.” You get exactly what you paid for. At two hours, it is long. As Sparks’ film adaptations go, it is not as good as The Notebook (which featured Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams plus Gena Rowlands, James Garner, Sam Shepard, and Joan Allen) but it’s better than the aforementioned Dear John (with Hannah Montana, Channing Tatum, and Greg Kinnear).
This ought to do fine at the box office but fizzle in a couple of weeks. As a Valentine’s Day film, it is bitter chocolate (I had to throw that in since Hallstrom directed the lovely, 5-time Academy Award nominated Chocolat).