K-SCORE: 28
Director: Lasse Hallstrom
Based on: Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks
Starring: Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel, Cobie Smulders
Spoiler Level: Moderate
In the coward’s film Safe Haven a woman escapes a dark incident in Boston and moves to a small beach town where she falls in love with a man whose wife died years earlier of cancer and who single-handedly raises two adorable kids. I should have hated it. In this Nicholas Sparks film adaptation, no courageous choices are made.
At first the protagonist is meant to appear culpable of something, but at a certain point she’s revealed as a pure victim, so there isn’t even a struggle to accept her for who she is, her past, and the lie she feels she has to tell. In addition to that, the actress that plays her is disturbingly attractive. She’s the kind of outrageously hot, quintessentially cute and innocent-looking, that even if she were a cold-blooded murderer, men would still do just about anything to help her out on the off off off off chance they’d one day be able to see her naked.
“rooting for cliche relationships to progress to their cliche conclusions”
The male lead is a pure cliche perfect man. Sure he’s experienced in relationships, but none of them actually went sour. His wife died. Poor guy. And he’s been raising two darling, well-behaved little children all on his own. Did I mention it looks like every muscle in his body was sculpted? Well it does. And of course the setting, what better choice than a picturesque beach town that has inexplicably avoided drawing any annoying tourists or overly large crowds.
The culmination of all the events that the writers call plot go exactly as everyone would expect with one small twist that takes the film into the realm of paranormal. It is humorously inauthentic and strikes such a dissonant chord that it really takes this bad film to the next level of bad, which I guess is Nicholas Sparks bad.
Somehow though, I didn’t hate watching it. Maybe the leads actually had some chemistry that developed in a way that had me rooting for cliche relationships to progress to their cliche conclusions. Maybe I was just in the mood for a sappy love story. Maybe I was just excited for the off off off off chance that Julianne Hough would take her clothes off off off off. I don’t know. Watching Safe Haven is like eating Cheetos. You know they’re bad but you just keep eating them anyway, unable to tell whether you secretly like the puffy chemical powder corn product or hate yourself.