Safe Haven

 

It's Valentine's Day weekend, which means it's time for another visit from the Nicholas Sparks romance factory.  We get an adaptation of a Sparks novel just about every year, and this year's film, Safe Haven, is an awful lot like what we've got in the past.  We have two attractive young lovers - one with a mysterious past, and the other with a tragic past, usually involving the loss of a loved one due to cancer.  We have a one-dimensional villain/bully, whose sole purpose is to make things miserable for the lovers, and is usually the ex of one of the people in the couple.  We also have a lot of picturesque scenery, which serves it purpose during the many music montages that are used to pad out the thin plot.  In other words, it's everything you'd expect.

As the film opens, we find our young and attractive heroine, Katie (Julianne Hough) on the run from the law.  We see brief and fleeting glimpses of her backstory throughout the film, which makes it looks like she is fleeing from a murder scene.  When we get the full story late in the film, we learn that she is truly innocent.  Not that we don't know that right off the bat.  Romantic heroes in Nicholas Sparks stories can do no wrong.  Katie hops on a bus to escape the detective pursuing her.  After riding for what seems like days, she hops off in quiet little seaside town that seems to be made up of I'd say around 20 people, tops.  Of primary interest to Katie is Alex (Josh Duhamel), a handsome and kindhearted young man who runs the local general store.  Not only did Alex lose his wife a few years ago to cancer, but he has two adorable little kids who sometimes help him out in the store, and act as a plot device when needed. (His little boy is still upset over his mom's death, and doesn't know how to handle it.)

Katie settles into the new town, buying a small little shack for herself out in the middle of the woods, and getting a job working as a waitress at the local diner.  She has a lot of run-ins with Alex and his kids, and before too long, they're getting closer, going on day trips to the beach, and canoeing.  Before you know it, Katie and Alex can't seem to stay away from each other.  Never mind that they never really have much to talk about.  They're both attractive, that's all that counts in this movie.  As the two begin to fall into lover's bliss, the film constantly hints that there's trouble afoot.  Remember the detective pursuing Katie at the beginning of the story?  He's played by David Lyons, and he seems to have quite the obsession with her, for reasons I will not spoil, should you choose to see this film.  Not that it's too hard to figure out his role in the story.  The movie makes it clear right from the start that he's pretty much slime, who likes to threaten little old ladies.  And hey, that's not water he's drinking in that bottle he always carries with him, that's vodka!!

The plot of the detective trying to track Katie down is obviously supposed to add tension to Safe Haven, but it doesn't do a very good job.  That's because very little actually happens here.  After Katie arrives in the new town in the first five minutes of the film, we pretty much get to spend over an hour of her slowly opening up to Alex and his kids.  She laughs, she goes for a swim, she plays with the kids, and she tries to pick out the right color to paint her kitchen floor.  It would at least be something if we got a sense of a relationship growing between her and Alex, but the movie doesn't even do that good of a job conveying that.  We never really get to see what they want in each other, other than the obvious physical attraction.  Anyone can make a movie about a woman falling in love with Josh Duhamel.  It takes a real script to give these characters personality, and an actual reason to fall for each other.

To be fair, the movie does have one element that came as a surprise to me, and not in a good way.  That would be the very loopy plot twist that the film tosses in quite literally in the final two minutes.  It's so unnecessary and so far out there, you have to wonder who thought it was a good idea.  I have not read the novel the film is based on, but doing some research, I learned that the book ends the same way, so it's not exactly the fault of the screenwriters for throwing it in there.  But still, couldn't anyone see that the ending the way it is written just doesn't work?  Did they have no desire to maybe change it?  It's the kind of last minute revelation that leaves you sulking out of the theater, which is definitely the wrong tone to go for in your feel-good romantic drama.

 

Regardless, I'm sure the movie will rake in the bucks this weekend.  Safe Haven is cinematic comfort food for anyone who has ever enjoyed a Nicolas Sparks story.  It contains all your favorite elements from his past stories, and it never offends.  Even with those terrible last couple minutes, the movie's not really all that bad.  Just way too familiar, and never all that interesting.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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