Let me preface this review by saying this: I have never seen a film based on a Nicolas Sparks book before. I’m not really the target demographic for a film of that nature, and have never been dragged into one against my will before. I have heard, however, nothing good about films that base themselves around his romantic drama novels. The Choice marks the sixteenth film to be based off one of his books, and, after having seen one myself, I cannot believe there are people out there who would sit through a similar story fifteen more times.
The movie follows Travis (Benjamin Walker from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) and Gabby (Teresa Palmer from Warm Bodies), who are new neighbors. Slowly but surely, Travis and Gabby begin to fall in love, with the occasional obstacle stopping them from finding true happiness. Does that seem shallow to you? Sound like I’m leaving anything out? Well, I’m really not.
The majority of this movie follows the two leads through the generic motions we would expect from a movie like this. She doesn’t like him at first. They bicker and complain about each other. Their friends and families tell them that they have met “the one”. Slowly, bickering turns to banter, banter turns to flirtation, and flirtation turns to sex on the dinner table. This slow build-up of the relationship might seem like a good Idea, building the characters and allowing the audience to get to know them. But that implies that there is anything to know. The two leads are wholeheartedly one-dimensional, offering little likeability and even less depth. Travis is a cocky-asshole, the kind of guy that movies like this try to convince us get the girl by pestering her until she falls for him. Gabby has as much personality as a plank of wood, one second loathing Travis and the next flirting with him constantly.
I can’t blame either Walker or Palmer for how their characters turned out, because that is entirely the fault of the script. Every other line is either a bad joke (which the actors try their hardest to make land but end up falling flat) or a corny line of dialogue that sounds like it came from a Hallmark card. I honestly don’t know whether to blame Bryan Sipe, who wrote the screenplay, or Nicolas Sparks himself. I suspect, though, that if many of the other films based on Sparks’s novels are like this, than there was little the screenwriter could do to save it.
And, honestly, there isn’t anything else to discuss. The film is so empty and has so little action that the movie is cripplingly boring. Perhaps, if the characters had been written a little bit better, given more likeable or complex personalities and dialogue, the movie may have been decent. However, even that probably couldn’t have saved this movie from its complete lack of interesting conflict. When you get down to it, this movie is boring at its core, and there is not much that could have fixed that.
Grade: D
The movie follows Travis (Benjamin Walker from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) and Gabby (Teresa Palmer from Warm Bodies), who are new neighbors. Slowly but surely, Travis and Gabby begin to fall in love, with the occasional obstacle stopping them from finding true happiness. Does that seem shallow to you? Sound like I’m leaving anything out? Well, I’m really not.
The majority of this movie follows the two leads through the generic motions we would expect from a movie like this. She doesn’t like him at first. They bicker and complain about each other. Their friends and families tell them that they have met “the one”. Slowly, bickering turns to banter, banter turns to flirtation, and flirtation turns to sex on the dinner table. This slow build-up of the relationship might seem like a good Idea, building the characters and allowing the audience to get to know them. But that implies that there is anything to know. The two leads are wholeheartedly one-dimensional, offering little likeability and even less depth. Travis is a cocky-asshole, the kind of guy that movies like this try to convince us get the girl by pestering her until she falls for him. Gabby has as much personality as a plank of wood, one second loathing Travis and the next flirting with him constantly.
I can’t blame either Walker or Palmer for how their characters turned out, because that is entirely the fault of the script. Every other line is either a bad joke (which the actors try their hardest to make land but end up falling flat) or a corny line of dialogue that sounds like it came from a Hallmark card. I honestly don’t know whether to blame Bryan Sipe, who wrote the screenplay, or Nicolas Sparks himself. I suspect, though, that if many of the other films based on Sparks’s novels are like this, than there was little the screenwriter could do to save it.
And, honestly, there isn’t anything else to discuss. The film is so empty and has so little action that the movie is cripplingly boring. Perhaps, if the characters had been written a little bit better, given more likeable or complex personalities and dialogue, the movie may have been decent. However, even that probably couldn’t have saved this movie from its complete lack of interesting conflict. When you get down to it, this movie is boring at its core, and there is not much that could have fixed that.
Grade: D
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