Starring: Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel, David Lyons
Fleeing on a bus, Katie (Hough) eventually arrives in a small town on the North Carolina coast, befriending a local store owner (Duhamel) and his two young children (Mimi Kirkland, Noah Lomax). As she tries to settle into her new life, a police officer (Lyons) is pursuing her on a charge of murder.
From Nicholas Sparks, who wrote The Notebook (which became a film in 2004) and acclaimed Swedish director, Lasse Hallström (ABBA music video director and also director of Chocolat (2000)) Safe Haven is what happens when female-targeted romance meets the thriller genre and the result is something of a mixed bag. Hallström’s trademark view of the beauty of rustic locales is perhaps the film’s strongest asset and as much as the romance and thriller combination seems like an ill fit, it works fairly well, thanks to some deft structuring. Safe Haven is not completely alone in this style and certain comparisons can be lent to Peter Weir’s film, Witness (1985), which also fused rustic romance starring a city-mouse protagonist with a cop thriller, and in fact there’s a romance sequence in Safe Haven which is very comparable to a similar sequence in Witness. However, the dialogue and characterisation lets this film down substantially. There is one good twist (not to mention a closing twist that is less impressive) but the characters are slightly one-dimensional, especially the villain, whilst the young boy character is a textbook example of a child character having dialogue that would seem more natural coming from someone a lot older. Towards the end, the always slightly flimsy plot does start to unravel quite quickly, but the film could’ve been a great deal worse than it was.See More
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