The Lucky One

I’m going to preface my review with this statement: I am an unashamed Nicholas Sparks fan. I own most of his books, all of his movies, and I still regularly stop and watch them when they’re airing on television.

I say this so when I tell you I didn’t love the adaptation of The Lucky One, you won’t assume I’m a snobby hater dissing it out of spite.

I wanted to love it. Zac Efron is about the hottest thing on the market these days, at least in this girl’s mind, and the previews suggested that he and Taylor Schilling had a sizzling chemistry. I read the book (some time ago) and was excited to see Logan and Elizabeth fall in love on the big screen.

The Lucky One isn’t a bad film. It’s entertaining, it’s heartfelt, and Zac Efron is ridiculously good looking in his boxer briefs. Even though it’s tied for my least favorite Sparks film (with The Last Song), it’s still light years better than the dreadful The Vow, which tried to pass itself off as a romance but made me want to punch the girl in the face every five minutes.

But I digress.

Our premise is fairly simple. Logan (Zac Efron) is on his third tour in Iraq when he spots a photograph in the rubble. As he picks it up, a bomb explodes where he had been standing, killing several of his comrades. By the time he returns home, he’s survived more encounters with death than seems fair, and feels guilty being the one to live when so many good men died. He decides to try to find the girl in the picture, and thank her for saving his life.

When he arrives in Hamden, Louisana, though, he can’t find the words and Beth (Taylor Schilling) doesn’t give him much of a chance to explain. She assumes he’s there in response to an employment ad, so in the end he takes the job and doesn’t say anything about the picture.

It turns out her brother Drake was also a Marine, and was killed in action a year previously. She’s struggling with that, her grandmother’s recent stroke, and raising Ben (Riley Thomas Stewart), her eight-year-old son, with her abusive, controlling ex-husband Keith (Jay R Ferguson). Logan is quiet, and obviously dealing with his own issues, but he slowly begins to worm his way into their lives and hearts.

The grandmother (Blythe Danner) is the first one to warm to him, and watches with a smile as Beth begins to fall for Logan in spite of her preconceived notions. The situation turns ugly when Keith threatens to use his position as town police officer and his father’s power as mayor to take Ben away if Beth doesn’t stop seeing Logan.

Things get uglier still when Logan’s secret is outed, making Beth wonder how she can trust a man who lied to her, but how she can be with someone who might have lived in the place of her beloved brother. In the grand tradition of Nicholas Spark’s stories, there is a tragic death, a question as to whether or not the central couple will end up together, and scenes written with the express intent of wringing tears from the audience.

There are some positives. The scenery is gorgeous, the cinematography and lighting are spectacular, and Zac Efron is a swoon inducing hero. The relationship between him and Ben is my favorite thing about the film, and Blythe Danner adds much needed humor and a subtlety that’s missing from the rest of the cast. There were three scenes in which I felt fully invested, and that choked me up. One was in the garden, when Beth breaks down over the loss of her brother (their parents are dead, so they had only one another). The second was a scene between Ben and Logan, where the little boy says goodbye to the man who took the time to not only know him, but accept him for the person he might one day become. The third was a scene at the end where Logan tells Beth what happened to her brother.

You’ll notice that not one of those scenes were both between our central characters and about our central characters.

And that’s because although the chemistry between Logan and Beth flickers from time to time, it never ignites. I never got that ‘holy crow I’m going to absolutely die if the two of them don’t end up together’ feeling that completely essential to the ultimate success of these types of films.

That’s my biggest problem with the movie, and unfortunately that’s not something that can be foreseen or predicted ahead of time.

A couple of smaller issues:

The dialogue, particularly for Logan, is awkward and too obvious a lot of the time. I actually think Efron is a talented actor, but this script didn’t do him any favors.

Keith’s character is all over the damn place. The writer goes out of the way to try and humanize him one moment, then makes him a frightening stalker, then he quits his job over the guilt and goes crying to Beth, then he threatens her, etc. It’s hard to know how to feel about him, but the back and forth ultimately makes it impossible to care about him at all.

We don’t get to know Logan well enough. We’re expected to “get” him by assigning a generic “he’s sad because he’s a soldier and he’s seen lots of bad things” person, but without any insight into his particular psyche it comes off as cliched. Efron does what he can with silent looks and brooding, but all in all it’s hard to love a guy we don’t know.

I didn’t even come close to shedding a tear. And that means this film failed.