A pretty standard chick-flick with all the required ingredients but never quite reached the heights of being anything fantastic or something that had you in floods of tears one minute and you’re heart leaping the next. A solid and good to watch movie; nothing more, nothing less.
Nicholas Sparks knows romance… or his fans think he does. In Sparks’ latest book-to-film adaptation ‘The Lucky One’, it makes a romantic lead out of a US soldier yet again (the first being 2011’s ‘Dear John’) and like anyone, he too falls in love. Zac Efron plays Logan Thibault, an Iraq vet with three tour duties under his belt. On his last tour, his company was attacked and he was luckily saved albeit by a pretty young woman’s picture with a ‘Keep Safe’ inscription.
After this, Logan promises to thank his ‘savior’ in person and so he walks cross-country to Louisiana, where he meets the woman named Beth Green (Taylor Schilling), a young divorced mother who runs a dog kennel. Logan is hired on the spot to help out and from there Nicholas Sparks’ story does his magic.
When it comes to love stories it seems author Nicholas Sparks has it covered. ‘The Lucky One’ is the seventh film adaptation of a Sparks novel and from the looks of it, business is a-booming. Unfortunately, Sparks isn’t exactly a fan of originality. Even with the boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-fall-in-love, boy-and-girl-have-trouble-in-paradise, and boy-and-girl-have-their-happy-ending formula that Sparks has almost perfected, with ‘The Lucky One’ it just feels contrived. Somehow the formula is not working and it’s not entirely Sparks’ fault.
With screenplay by Will Fetters (‘Remember Me’) and directed by Scott Hicks (‘Shine’, ‘Snow Falling On Cedars’), ‘The Lucky One’ tries to make you swoon but ends up making you yawn. The love story in itself is inevitable and simple – what woman doesn’t fall in love with a buffed-up Zac Efron and his baby blues?! – that there are no risks to take. With the leading lady’s jackass of a sheriff-ex-husband, of course, the choice has been already made for you. It also doesn’t help that its lead star-crossed lovers – Efron and Schilling – have zero chemistry. In fact, they look more like brother and sister than fated to fall in love. Hence, ‘The Lucky One’ is such a romantic hard sell.
If you want a good Nicholas Sparks love story, better to re-watch ‘The Notebook’ instead.