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Beautiful yet self-effacing, Katie seems determined to avoid forming personal ties until a series of events draws her into two reluctant relationships: one with Alex, a widowed store owner with a kind heart and two young children and another with her plainspoken single neighbor, Jo. When a mysterious young woman named Katie appears in the small North Carolina town of Southport, her sudden arrival raises questions about her past. Beautiful yet self-effacing, Katie seems determined to avoid forming personal ties until a series of events draws he From the #1 New York Times bestselling author comes a captivating love story filled with suspense and mystery. If you want to watch a romantic movie, save a couple of bucks and rent The Notebook, still the best of the Nicholas Sparks movies.From the #1 New York Times bestselling author comes a captivating love story filled with suspense and mystery.
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While there is nothing wrong with sticking to a premise that is working, and it’s clear these are movies to take a date to see around Valentine’s Day, the film does not bring anything fresh that justifies going out to the theater to see it. Overall, Safe Haven is a film that tries to present itself as a fresh take on the modern romance movie but at the end is just as formulaic as the rest. Now whether this was present in the novel I am not sure, but because I have not read it I place the blame on the filmmakers, who go for a shock value ending and end up getting one of the most idiotic and unrealistic endings of the past couple of years, and the laughing throughout my theater confirms that. Nevertheless, none of these points compare to how stupid the “twist ending” of the film is. The pacing, while done pretty well throughout the film, falters towards the end, becoming a choppy mess with cuts that take you completely out of the experience. Throughout the final climactic scene, everyone is trying way to hard to show distress, sadness, or fear and the acting gets brought down to that of a made for TV movie on a local station level. However, with about 30 to 45 minutes left in the film, Safe Haven switches gears completely and goes from a formulaic but still somewhat entertaining romantic film to an awfully acted, paced, and unbelievably stupid “thriller,” if you can even call it that. The formulaic story had me feeling cheated, and more importantly, very, very bored. You have the two main characters with troubled pasts (it gets even more cliché when the subplot is revealed, but for spoilers sake I won’t reveal it to you), the quaint town setting, and the relationship that starts off great, then gets put to the test, and ultimately gets resolved. The plot is familiar, following cliché after unremarkably tacky cliché.
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Other than John Duhamel and Julienne Hough, whose performances bring a sense of likability and freshness to the stereotypical Nicholas Sparks main characters, everything throughout this film feels pretty generic and gives off the feeling that the filmmakers were making another Nicholas Sparks adaptation for the sake of doing so. Her journey ends in Southport, North Carolina, where she begins to bond with a recent widower (Josh Duhamel) and his two kids, all while trying to keep her dark past a secret. Safe Haven follows the story of Katie (Julianne Hough), a woman who decides to pack up her life in Boston after a traumatic event and move down south. From the trailers, however, the film marketed itself as trying to innovate this subgenre through the use of a thriller subplot. Sparks is no stranger to film adaptations his novels are responsible for films such at The Notebook, Dear John, The Lucky One, and now Safe Haven. This year, much like the last couple of years, Hollywood seeks help from popular novelist Nicholas Sparks for a romance film. When Valentine’s Day comes around, a fair amount of things are sure to happen: couples will show their affection more publically than ever before, chocolate and flower sales will skyrocket, and a romantic film, most likely based on a popular novel, will be released.