The Best Of Me
Director: Michael Hoffman
Starring: James Marsden, Michelle Monaghan, Luke Brace
118 mins; Class 12;
KRS Releasing Ltd

Many of bestselling romantic author Nicholas Sparks’s novels have been adapted to film, including Message in a Bottle (1999), The Notebook (2004), Dear John (2010), and The Lucky One (2012, notable for co-starring a pre-Orange is the New Black Taylor Schilling) and Safe Haven (2013).

The formula is simple. All stories are set in picturesque locations, starring impossibly beautiful people entangled in complicated – so Sparks would have it – romantic situations where they have to overcome impossible odds to be together and live happily ever after.

Well, some of the times, for the author enjoys throwing in the odd ‘sudden’ death into the mix to add to the melodrama, mawkishness and predictability that so often underline his stories. The good news for his millions of fans (and the bad news to his many detractors) is that adaptation number nine, The Best of Me, veers not a jot from said formula.

Hard at work with his colleagues on an oil rig out at sea, Dawson Cole (James Marsden) takes a break to read Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design. His moment of light reading is interrupted when an explosion rocks the rig.

Is it too much to ask for romantic drama to have a little edge?

Dawson heroically saves a workmate before being flung a hundred feet deep into the ocean. Despite the plunge, hypothermia and other ailments, he survives in what his doctor describes as a miracle. Cole believes that he survived the accident because he has a destiny to fulfil – what that destiny is, he doesn’t know.

In the meantime, in anodyne suburbia, Amanda Collier (Michelle Monaghan) survives another day in her marriage to the indifferent Frank as her son prepares to go to college. One afternoon Amanda gets an upsetting phone call from a lawyer telling her the news of the death of an old friend.

Miles away, Dawson receives a similar phone call, and he and Amanda meet up at the lawyer’s office… where, what do you know, the spark they shared when they were high school sweethearts is immediately reignited.

Cue numerous flashbacks which take their sweet time to get to the point that Dawson’s violent white trash father and brothers and Amanda’s snooty upper-class family will never allow their relationship to blossom.

Forgive my cynicism. I know that this is aimed squarely at a particular audience only. However, is it too much to ask for a romantic drama to have a little edge, deeper characterisation and less histrionics and ridiculous coincidences? Clearly it is.

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