Heart-felt 'Lucky One' can't fully commit to romantic message
"The Lucky One" spins an earnest romantic tale fraught with sharp humor, erotically charged intimacy, bungled cinematic devices, squelched spirituality and cute dogs,
There are times in Scott Hicks' movie version of Nicholas Sparks' best-selling story that conjure up the more intimate moments from "Jerry Maguire," right down to a moral hero bonding with the precocious son of a deserving single mother.
Yet, "The Lucky One" is a perplexing romance riddled with Sparks' tentative mix of fate and true love, a sincere drama unwilling to confirm that a higher power (A deity? Fate?) has thrown together two highly compatible strangers before employing an outrageously cheesy act of God to conveniently eliminate a main obstacle to their happiness.
"The Lucky One" begins with U.S. Marine Sergeant Logan Thibault (a beefed-up, Clint Eastwood-channeling ex-teen heartthrob Zac Efron) serving his third tour in Iraq when a photograph in the sand catches his heavenly blue eye. It's a photo of a blonde woman with the words "Keep safe" on the back.
Logan walks over to pick it up, an act that saves his life when an explosion kills the Marines around him. One of his buddies refers to the woman in the picture as his "guardian angel."
Stateside, Logan sets out to discover the angel's identity. (Apparently it just takes a few minutes of flashing the photo around some bars and stores in a small Louisiana town.)
She turns out to be Beth, played by blue-eyed Taylor Schilling, an actress without vast reservoirs of substance, but she's so sparklingly radiant that you almost need sunglasses to watch her.
Beth runs a dog kennel with help from her wise and kindly grandmother Nana (Blythe Danner) and Beth's chess-playing, violin-playing young son Ben (Riley Thomas Stewart).
Logan tries to tell Beth why he's come to her kennel. She assumes he's applying for a job. So, Logan never quite gets around to telling her he's been obsessed with her photo and has been tracking her down for months.
The wise and knowing Nana hires Logan over Beth's objections. The quiet stranger who constantly walks everywhere also strikes a wrong chord with Deputy Sheriff Keith Clayton (Jay R. Ferguson, perfectly cast). He's Beth's provincial, self-centered ex-husband and Ben's un-doting father who always says just the right thing to undermine Ben's self-confidence and enthusiasm.
From here on in, "The Lucky One" follows a pleasingly formulaic plot in which the once-burned Beth realizes there are good guys out there, such as Logan.
But life is messy, and Keith constantly looms his power over Beth - threatening to take custody of Ben - if she won't obey both his rules and whims.
Hicks directs some nice scenes in "The Lucky One," especially of Beth washing dishes and becoming distracted by muscular Logan unloading a truck.
"You deserve to be kissed every day," Logan tells Beth. "Every hour. Every minute."
Yep. That would probably be a consensus of most male movie patrons, and Efron delivers the cornball line with all the sincerity he can muster.
Yet, in a crucial scene when Beth demands to know why Logan has a photo she gave her brother in Iraq (we all knew that scene was barreling down the pike, didn't we?), Logan launches into a wonderful soliloquy, confessing his feelings while explaining himself.
But for the first half of his speech, Logan turns his back on Beth and talks to the trees instead, hardly communicating a personal "Jerry Maguire" moment of connection.
Efron's performance is all stoically stiff and minimalistic, which works in the beginning, but he never lets Logan loosen up and strike a few sparks behind his firmly fixed gaze.
"Everyone has their destiny to fulfill," Logan tells us in a voice-over summary. "Some don't choose to follow it."
Wait a second.
If you can choose not to follow destiny, how exactly can it be destiny?
Oh, yes. We're in the land of Nicholas Sparks, where fate determines outcome. Maybe.
“The Lucky One”
★ ★ ½
Starring: Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling, Blythe Danner, Riley Thomas Stewart, Jay R. Ferguson
Directed by: Scott Hicks
Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for sexual situations and violence. 101 minutes