Safe Haven is the latest adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel to make it from the page to the screen. The guy has basically become a ubiquitous machine who churns out relationship drama after relationship drama at this point, so you know who he is. He who wrote things like “A Walk to Remember” and “The Notebook”—stories set in the south where the sun somehow always seems to be setting, epic romances are always of the forbidden kind, and usually someone has secret cancer. This time around Julianne Hough is playing a young girl on the run from a mysterious and dangerous past, and Josh Duhamel is playing the ruggedly handsome widower and father of two who she falls in love with once she picks a small town to lay low in. They meet, they court, and then the danger catches up with her. It’s basically Sleeping With the Enemy.
The opening of the film, where Hough’s character is hurriedly trying to get out of town to escape her pursuers, was pretty ridiculous in how frantic a tone it set, but it worked well enough to suck you in and set up the fact that the film had big stakes. But, unfortunately, that overwrought approach just keeps ramping up over the course of the film until everything starts to play like melodramatic nonsense. The scenes we get featuring the policeman who is looking for her are ridiculous. They’re all him scowling while creepy music plays, and they almost feel like parody. Conversely, the romance scenes between Hough and Duhamel are so paint by numbers and generic that they bore completely. You know their courtship is just a time killer until the past comes back to confront her in the third act, and eventually all of the time killing starts to make the movie feel way longer than it actually is. Then, once that confrontation happens—oh boy—the movie gets so overly dramatic that the characters stop resembling people at all and just become figures on an opera stage gesturing for the back row.
Still, the film works well enough as weepy emotion porn, so long as you’re in the demographic of young girls who enjoy indulging in that sort of thing—but it’s not going to do much for anyone else. Sparks basically has one skill, and it’s finding that note that makes a certain subset of relationship-obsessed women cry, and then hitting it over and over again. Safe Haven isn’t structured well and is, at turns, forgettable or over the top. Hough reads as being too young for her role, and Duhamel isn’t really believable doing anything other than being a torso for a shirt to hang off of. However, if you’re the type of person who likes to cry to sad things happening while sad music plays, or you have an obsessive crush on one of the two stars, then probably you’ll enjoy the movie quite a bit. If that's the case, you already knew that though.
