To date, eight novels from the popular author Nicholas Sparks have been adapted into film. 
There are romance movies, then there’s Nicholas Sparks, making him now officially a genre of his own.  Seeing a romantic movie is one thing; when you go to see a Sparks romance you
know what you’re in for.

In Safe Haven, champion ballroom dancer Julianne Hough plays Katie, a woman on the run.  Like her character in her last film, Rock of Ages, Hough boards a bus in the opening scenes in order to escape her past. We don’t know what she’s running from but we know that it’s something bad involving a knife, a body on the ground and someone presumably chasing her.

Katie ends up in an idyllic North   Carolina town along the coast where within minutes she lands a job as a waitress.  The job must pay exceptionally well because in the blink of an eye she also lands a rustic cottage in the woods, the kind of place where anyone living in the rat
race of a city must dream about, even it needs a little fixing up here and there.  If artist Thomas Kincaid lived nearby, he’d paint the place.

The romance kicks in once Katie meets handsome Alex (Josh Duhamel) a recently widowed father of two whose wife died of cancer.  Katie has a reluctance to enter into any kind of relationship, but somewhere around the fifty minute mark, Katie says yes to a trip in canoe, and from there love blossoms.  “Katie,” her nearest neighbor in the woods, Jo (Cobie Smulders) tells her.  “You have people here who care about you.”

The plot is relatively simple, peppered with teaser flashbacks indicating that something dark will eventually catch up with Katie in the final act.  The flashbacks are referred to as teasers because every time we see one it adds a little bit of information to that certain event that
we never knew before.  We become cinematic detectives, piecing together little bits of information, but we never have to work for it.  The film arbitrarily decides when it wants to show you something extra.  Once we eventually get the full picture by the film’s conclusion, the big reveals are neither as interesting nor as clever as the build up suggests.  Author Sparks has developed the art of mediocre story-telling and decorating it with tried and tested methods of plot developments.  He makes something appear interesting, but it’s really not.  It’s merely routine. 

As expected, the film’s widescreen cinematography makes the coastal town and its  surrounding area look wonderful.  The town appears to be populated by all kinds of attractive people who want to help Katie get back on her feet, and the weather is ideal, raining only when the dramatic moment requires it to rain. 

Safe Haven will work for those who enjoy getting lost within the pages of a Sparks novel –
after eight adaptations, his films gives you exactly what you have come to expect – plus, with a Valentine’s Day opening it really can’t go wrong for its target audience, but like many novels that create something real enough on the written page, making it into a film exposes its overall story telling weakness.  There’s not a moment that truly challenges, but I have a feeling that those who enjoy a good cry at the movies won’t care.  

MPAA Rating:  PG-13     Length:  115 minutes      Overall Rating: 5 (out of 10)