Why This is Good

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for a good tear-jerking Nicholas Sparks adaptation. A Walk to Remember and The Notebook will have me bawling no matter how many times I’ve watched them.  And although the Oscar-nominated Crazy Heart was playing at the same time and I knew it would probably be a better film, the teenage girl in me opted for Dear John. I was fully prepared to fall in love along with the beautiful Amanda Seyfried and equally gorgeous Channing Tatum, and bawl my eyes out when some tragedy tore them apart. While some might fault Sparks for being sentimental and melodramatic, I appreciate that he is not afraid to examine the illnesses that are a reality for many people. His works can be a little formulaic, and Dear John was no exception. As Walk to Remember dealt with cancer and The Notebook with Alzheimer’s, Dear John focused on Autism. The bravery and honesty with which it was portrayed, notably by Richard Jenkins as John’s aging father, was the best part of the movie, but it didn’t save the film overall from its major flaws.

As with his other adaptations, Dear John presented us with another pair of attractive young people torn apart by outside forces bent on destroying their pure, amazing, incredible love. In this case it was the war that took dear John away from Savannah’s loving embrace.  The story was less predictable than I predicted, but sadly the acting was so horrible that I couldn’t bring myself to shed a single tear. Channing Tatum is gorgeous but he can hardly speak, his acting so wooden he could give Pinocchio splinters. While Amanda Seyfried is stunningly gorgeous and possesses possibly the most beautiful pair of blue eyes ever made, I couldn’t help but see a bit of the vacancy she displayed in Mean Girls poking through in this performance. I won’t go so far as to say they had no chemistry, but I will say their passion fell flat and I didn’t feel the love in the way I was expecting to, and because of that, this film failed to draw out a single tear from someone who can tear up after viewing a mere commercial featuring a soldier returning home to a loving family. This is Nicholas Sparks, it should have left me bawling. And it wasn’t just me. I heard more snickers than sniffling from the teenage through sixty-something women in the audience around me, and for that reason alone Dear John was quite a disappointing failure.