Today's movie is one of those Nicholas Sparks romantic dramas that make the ladies swoon, the guys they are married to seem inferior, but we get bonus points for watching the movie with them. Of course, for every Notebook which kicks you in the gut with how great a film it is, and makes you cry like a baby at the ending...
What?
My man card says crying at the end of the Notebook is totally justified.
Anyway, for every Notebook, there is a litany of films that aim for the stars, but barely get off the ground.
The Story:
A Marine (Zac Efron) finds a picture in a combat zone, and it literally saves his life. When he gets out of the Marine Corps, he decides to find the woman in the picture who he feels he owes a debt of gratitude. Naturally, before he can fully explain, things happen, and he never really gets around to telling her the whole truth. Sparks fly...
You can see where this is going, right?
So no, it's no Notebook. But, it's also not a bad film. Way more entertaining that it probably has any right to be, and much better than, say, Dear John was.
So Zac Efron works really hard to play a "man" instead of a teenager. With his looks, he'll have to wait probably another decade to pull it off completely, but for the most part, he does a good job with his role.
You can connect the dots to the story long before the characters do, and amazingly the conflict between our hero and villain does not play out like I was expecting, so I'll have to give the film a thumbs up for daring to be different and avoiding the obvious.
Worth a viewing, and one that could be good background noise in the future, but I won't be adding it to the library. However if you have a need to watch a romantic drama, this could definitely score you some brownie points for the evening.
And that's always a good thing.
: )
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