Safe Haven

safe havenReleased: 2013
Director: Lasse Hallstrom
Starring: Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel

Turgid, tragic and tiresome

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I set myself a task at the beginning of the year to go through my DVD collection and watch all of my unwatched films. I’ll admit it – we’ve reached the beginning of March and I’ve not made much, um, any progress. In fact I’ve bought new films that I’ve not watched yet so I’m actually going backwards. But it’s a brand new month and there’s still the majority of the year left. While I was looking at the shelves I realised that I really don’t have that many romantic films in my collection. Am I an unromantic, black-hearted cynic? The cinema release of Safe Haven offered me the opportunity to test my head and heart for romance.

Julianne Hough plays Katie, a young woman on the run from a mysterious and blood-soaked past. She arrives in a picturesque small town where she meets and falls in love with widower Alex, but her past in the shape of a determined detective is soon on her trail.

To call Safe Haven a turgid potboiler with tragically bad acting would be a kindness to all involved. The plot is laughably thin and at a couple of points which I’m sure were supposed to be moments of high drama I did actually laugh. The acting was fairly bad too – neither Julianne Hough nor Josh Duhamel as Alex had the talent or the charisma to carry a romantic film. I never really cared if they got together or not. The only decent cast member was Cobie Smulders and she stood out like a sore thumb and her part is ultimately too stupid for words.

The script was full of clichés and the twists (bar one) were signposted from the beginning of the film. There’s too much expectation on the audience to suspend disbelief – could someone really drive from Boston to North Carolina (about 800 miles and just under 12 hours, I checked), drinking whisky all the way and not be stopped or crash? And that’s just one example of the stupidity. There are several more – a child hits his head and falls into water for several minutes but people on the dockside decide he’s fine. I don’t know any parent who wouldn’t want their kid to go to hospital. These people are morons and people who care what happens to them are morons.

Worse than the poor script, bad acting and sheer stupidity of the film is the fact that it’s really quite dull. I nodded off at least once and only my fruit pastilles kept me awake for the majority of the film. It was thoroughly disappointing. On the plus side, the North Carolina setting looked beautiful and if I was ever going to run away from home and start a new life that’s where I’d want to go.

Maybe I do have a black hole where my heart should be and don’t recognise a romantic love-story when I see one. I doubt it, I think I wasted my time going out to the cinema to see a rotten film when I have a couple of hundred unwatched DVDs at home.

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