LEAD CAST: Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel, Noah Lumax, Mimi Kirkland, David Lyons. DIRECTOR Lassie Halstrom. SCREENPLAY: Leslie Boheme and Dana Stevens, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Terry Stacey. MUSIC: Deborah Lurie. GENRE: Drama/romance. RUNNING TIME: 1:55
Technical
assessment: 3
Moral
assessment: 2.5
CINEMA
rating: A 14
MTRCB
rating: PG 13
In
a middle class home in Boston, a man is stabbed by a woman. There is no witness. Confused and with bloodied hands she
runs away. We learn later that to
help bury her past behind, she had cut her long dark hair and dyed it blonde,
and then she boarded a southbound bus.
She finds a low key North Carolina community where she can feel safe;
there she introduces herself as Katie (Julianne Hough), landing a job as waitress at a seaside resort. She rents a cabin in the woods, certain
that as a complete stranger she would then start a new life. She is soon befriended by a neighbor Jo
(Cobie Smulders) and the owner of the town’s general store Alex (John Duhamel),
a recent widower with a pre-teen son Josh (Noah Lumax), who has yet to get over
his mother’s loss, and a perky eight-year old daughter (Mimi Kirkland). After the first alternately polite and
awkward encounters, Alex and Katie start to warm up to each other. Things get sweeter—until Alex spots a
bulletin at the local police station tagging Katie as a suspect in a
first-degree murder case.
Message in a Bottle, The Notebook, Dear John, and Safe Haven—they
have something in common. They’re all Nicholas Sparks
novels, of course, and as romance stories
they all give hope to people (especially women) who believe that for every
woman there is a man destined to be hers alone, who will be faithful to her,
love her forever and ever. It
doesn’t hurt if the man is also good looking and well-mannered and tender
hearted and … well, a good catch.
Chick-flicks, that’s what they’re called. People in general do not see such movies to criticize,
measure its merits in the technical department and see if they’re Oscar
material. They draw crowds who
want to nurture their romantic hopes or to get carried away by their
drama. But, of course, CINEMA
cannot but say a few things about how well made Safe Haven is—until the unexpected twist towards the end.
With
the credible though predictable plot, the likeable characters, the bad guy we
would want to protect these beautiful characters from, we are willing to close
an eye to a few editing slips so we can hope without interruption that
everybody would end up happily ever after—after all how can anything untoward
happen in such a pretty place as that safe haven? But Safe Haven
pricks its own high flying balloon, and we land on the ground with a thud,
feeling we’ve been had. This uncalled
for denouement to the story douses cold water on our viewing pleasure, and
we’re left to wonder if the movie’s genre should now be changed from romance to
horror, or maybe even psychological thriller.
Worse, we come to ask: shouldn’t the heroine who has so elicited our
sympathy be locked up in an asylum?
Safe Haven’s
release must have been timed to fill the Valentine’s day craving for a romantic
pop corn date but, really, there are far more worth-your-money ways to
celebrate love with.
