Movie review: Spark’s romantic thriller flops

A Nicholas Sparks romantic thriller? Well, that sounds about as promising as a Stephen King children’s book, or a Lindsay Lohan recovery plan. Let’s see if it works out.

“Safe Haven,” is about a girl named Katie (Julianne Hough) who is on the run for some incident we don’t initially know about and stops at a sleepy town in Alabama. She takes a liking to the place and decides to stay as she begins to fall in love with a widowed store owner named Alex (Josh Duhamel). However, a cop is on the hunt for her to expose her secret past.

If it sounds like there is a forced thriller element, that’s because there is. The film has a stark contrast in tone between scenes and it feels like you are watching two very different movies. One minute you’re in romantic sunshine land, then you’re quickly interrupted by dark scenes, filled with shaky cam, of a guy looking at his computer intently. It’s all over the place, to say the least.

Eventually, the thriller side of the movie completely takes over. This would be fine, if it were any good, but the bad cop, played by David Lyons on the trail of Katie, is so over the top, it’s almost comical. He likes to fill his water bottles with vodka. All this thriller stuff feels really unnecessary and ends up making the film feel bloated. Seriously, things slow down big time after the one-hour mark because of how predictable the plot becomes.

And, as if the movie could not become any more disjointed, it throws one last curve ball at the end of the film – a twist ending so stupid, so irrelevant and so far out of left field that whoever let this slide in the editing room should be fired.

Okay, positives: It’s hard to deny how beautiful the cinematography is. The more romance-oriented scenes of the film have this warm radiance to them that’s pretty intoxicating. One scene in particular, where the couple goes canoeing, looks like a painting in motion.

Also, the daughter of Alex, played by Mimi Kirkland, is ridiculously cute and has some pretty funny dialogue. Her presence is always a pleasure, and I would like to have seen more of her. Alex’s son, on the other hand, is a total brat and is badly written. At one point he is bitching about how he doesn’t like Katie, but then does a total 180 and is suddenly okay. It’s a shame that his frustration with his father is quickly swept under the rug, because it could have been an interesting plot element. It also doesn’t help that the young actor, Noah Lomax, is a bad little actor.

The romantic chemistry and plot in this movie isn’t terrible, but it’s certainly not good. Hough is just, bleh. Katie is a hard character to like because she has a tough exterior, and Hough’s stale acting doesn’t help. It felt like Duhamel was trying to romance a very cold and emotionless cardboard cutout with a really nice body. Eventually Katie warms up, but it happens so abruptly that it feels a little forced. The charm of Duhamel at least makes the romance bearable, with no help from Hough nor the cheesy script, and delivers a few cute scenes.

Overall, it felt like I was flipping between an average Lifetime romance, and a very bad episode of CSI played at half-speed.

If the movie hadn’t wasted so much time and energy with all of the half-baked thriller elements and spent more time developing the relationship with Alex, Katie and the kids, this may have been a film worth recommending (and the twist ending would have been less stupid.)

If you really need something to watch on Valentine’s Day weekend with your special someone, I recommend saving your money instead and dusting off your copy of “The Notebook.”