Review of Safe Haven (2013) by John M — 21 May 2013

More white people embracing. So a woman trying to get away from her past (Julianne Hough) comes to a small town where she starts to fall for a local single father of two (Josh Duhamel), but her past is much closer than she thinks.

I am somewhat of the mindset that if you've seen one Nicholas Sparks movie, you've kind of seen them all. Somebody has to die at the end, there's a score that features a lot of guitar plucking, and all of his typical tropes are featured here, and it is not one of his stronger adaptations.

To the credit of the filmmaker, the chemistry between the two leads does work for the most part, and they do make for a good couple. Where this runs into trouble is that there is so much fat that could have been trimmed off.

It is an interesting enough of a premise, but the pacing moves at a crawl; there is easily 20-30 minutes that could have been cut out completely, and it would have made for a much tighter, streamlined narrative.

Despite the ever-present Lifetime movie vibe, I could have given this a low recommendation, if only for the romance between Hough and Duhamel... at ninety minutes. At a two-hour runtime, this just tried my patience, and made my eyelids heavy more than anything.