23 February 2013
Directed By: Lasse Hallström
Starring: Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel, Cobie Smulders
What It’s About: While running from her past, a young woman meets the love of her life.
Rated PG-13 (violence and sexuality)
Runtime: 115 minutes
By Shelby Clemons, Staff Writer
In his latest novel-turned-film, Safe Haven, Nicholas Sparks does what he does best: make a sappy romance that teenage girls drag their boyfriends to on Valentine’s Day. Though it’s a great movie for hopeless romantics, it fails to be much more than another lovey-dovey, cliché movie.
Safe Haven captivates the audience for a moment with its plot twists and cheesy scenes, but overall fails to impress as a film. If you have seen a Nicholas Sparks movie, you have seen them all. There is a white, heterosexual couple that falls in love, experiences hardships and then someone dies and/or something really bad happens to them.
Like the trailers show, there is a girl, “Katie” (Julianne Hough), on the run from something while a cop (David Lyons) relentlessly hunts her down. The exciting opening sequence shows her running from what looks like a violent scene to someone’s house (where she stealthily cuts and dyes her hair to mask her identity), and then to a bus station, which she quickly flees. When she comes across the sleepy, tiny town of Southport, North Carolina, Katie decides to stay for a while. There, she meets widower Alex (Josh Duhamel), a father of two and the owner of the local general store.
The two become closer until one day the truth about “Katie” (whose real name is Erin) and her past comes out in the form of a wanted poster. Despite the fact that she hid her real identity and might possibly be a murder suspect, Alex confesses his love (awww?), and Katie finally comes clean: she’s on the run from an abusive, alcoholic husband whose identity is the first big plot twist.
Safe Haven gets some points for being a bit more than you would expect; it meshes a thriller, a romance and even some supernatural elements all into one. However, just because these elements might make it less painful for the male gender to watch, that doesn’t mean this film is a winner.
In fact, Safe Haven has too many plot holes and a plot twist that is a bit too weird. For starters, Katie somehow manages to find a waitressing job and buy a house about five seconds after arriving in town. Second, she suspiciously befriends Jo (Cobie Smulders), who she finds peering into her windows (that’s how I meet all of my friends), and somehow never tells anyone about the friendship, even her own love interest. Lastly, Alex’s kids are seemingly never told the truth about Katie/Erin/whatever-her-name-is, on top of the fact that Alex himself never knew anything about Katie to begin with.
As for the surprising ending, you want to think that the twist makes the story more romantic, but at its core it is just really mushy and a little peculiar (this is where the supernatural thing comes in).
Cliché can be done right, but Safe Haven is nothing near a shining example of that. A damaged woman and a grieving man come together, a dad struggles with the standoffish nature of his motherless son and there’s even a dreamy dance to an old song in a diner—been there, done that. And to top it off, while Katie and Alex are on a sweet canoe ride, it starts pouring down rain out of nowhere (hello, we’ve all seen The Notebook!).
Safe Haven is nothing less than what you would expect from a romantic Nicholas Sparks movie, which is its saving grace. Unfortunately, it tries too hard to be something more than just another romance-novel-turned-film. But if romance-meets-crime-and-drama (with a side of ghostly encounters) is your thing, see Safe Haven.
5/10
Photo courtesy of www.aceshowbiz.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj6i_Z1Srsw