4/10

If the ladies are crying and the guys are dying, it must be Nicolas Sparks newest film. The Best of Me is the best selling adaptation of the book written by Sparks, and it’s about Dawson and Amanda, two former high school sweethearts who find themselves reunited after 20 years apart, when they return to their small town for the funeral of a beloved friend. Their bittersweet reunion reignites the love they’ve never forgotten, but soon they discover the forces that drove them apart twenty years ago live on, posing even more serious threats in the current day. This film didn’t do anything to change my mind about Sparks film adaptations. To be fair, i have never read any of his books, and only grade his scale on his film adaptations alone. The film isn’t as bad as some of the worst films i have seen of 2014, but it’s not a very good one either. There are so many problems that i had with this film, but i am not shallow enough to not appreciate the good things as well. An easy writing would be to dismiss this film simply because i am playing my “Man Card”, but i like to think that you the reader have more faith in your favorite film reviewer than that. First of all, the casting is decent at best. As Amanda, we get two performances from Michelle Monaghan and Liana Liberto. Liberto is definitely the better of the two as the younger version of our female protagonist. I didn’t mind Monaghan much, but she never does enough to make her personality anything memorable in the role. Every time i saw flashbacks during Liberto’s scenes, i couldn’t help but feel Ellen Pompeo would’ve been a better choice visually to compare to Liberto’s teenage face. This leads to the big problem i had with the casting of Dawson, LUKE BRACEY LOOKS NOTHING LIKE JAMES MARSDEN. Even to squint your eyes and defy everything you know about genes, this casting is completely opposite. Both are good in this role, but Bracey is not only taller, but he is more built. This would all be easy to dismiss except that Dawson towers over Amanda when they are teenagers, and then he is about two inches smaller than her when they hit adulthood. That is one hell of a growth spurt. One thing enjoyable about the film was the flashbacks to 1992, and the music that followed. I didn’t notice anything that really took me out of the scenes they were presenting, and the soundtrack was quite the audio scrapbook that i needed to take me back to some of my childhood favorites. Mainly, the biggest problems that i had with this film (Outside of tired romantic genre cliches) was the logical problems that take me out of any movie. I will be getting into spoiler territory here, so turn away now. During the first scene of the film, Dawson is blown into water by a huge oil explosion on a charter that he works at. He manages to land in the cleanest spot of water so we can perfetly see him in the water despite all of this oil spilling out around them. The back and forth transition of time era’s is something noticeably bad because it’s very confusing during the final scenes of the film. There is a scene in which Amanda’s son is in a car wreck and needs a heart operation. We learn the a donor has already been cleared and he is getting ready for surgery. It ends up that Dawson is the donor, but this announcement happens five minutes before Dawson is killed on screen. I know the viewer can say that Dawson could’ve died before the announcement due to the sloppy nature of the editing, but it’s still too soon and would take too long to rush a dead Dawson to the hospital to save this boy. I personally think the movie should’ve been told from a straight through viewing of young to old. The film doesn’t need any of the back and forth stuff, and it only confuses the audience. Another thing a little unsettling for me was the setting of this film in the south, and yet no one spoke with a southern accent with the exception of one character. Am i being picky? That’s up to your opinion. I have always felt that a film will take me out with these sloppy productions that were obviously never addressed. Sparks isn’t the director of the film, so i’m not even going to blame him. I blame director Michael Hoffman for his sloppy and uninspired choices. It seems Hoffman doesn’t care to address these issues because he knows his female audience will show up to support the movie no matter what, and to a certain degree he is right. The female audience of my showing ate this movie up, and loved every minute of it. To that degree, The Best of Me succeeds. I think a film like this will say so much more though if it can take moviegoers not known for liking films like this and convince them of some stellar film making. Instead, what we get is a crowded, cliche ridden, predictable rush of a film that crams in too much too fast for just under two hours. I will recomend this for the female audience only, and that’s because i am not foolish enough to believe for a second that they care about the things i mentioned in this review. The Best of Me was a little better than i thought it was going to be, but it’s story dooms a mediocre film into ever becoming something more. Not terrible, but not good either.