The Lucky One

Winner of several imaginary literary and filmmaking awards.

Rest easy: in spite of similarities in both theme and appearance, The Lucky One is actually not Charlie St. Cloud 2. The specter of deceased loved ones does linger over the proceedings, but it's done in a very amorphous mannet. And yes, there is a harrowing waterbound rescue sequence, but it is essentially a deus ex machina, so the screenplay can conveniently pass judgment on the its less-than-wholesome characters. Plus, there is the small matter that The Lucky One, unlike Charlie St. Cloud, doesn't entirely suck. There is certainly enough eye-rolling, teeth-gnashing plot machinations to make the sentient film lover's stomach churn, but the film is at least good-natured and occasionally charming, less flagrantly offensive than many recent tear-jerkers. Yes, I am damning with faint praise.

After The Vow convinced us all it was a Nicholas Sparks adaptation only to turn out to have been based on a true story, The Lucky One arrives in theaters as The Real Deal: a bonafide Sparks adaptation, complete with pristine Southern setting, exaggerated emotional conflicts, an odd blending of conservative ideals and do-gooder liberal values, and characters broadly drawn as saintly or villainous. Sparks doesn't work in subtlety and he uses tragic irony as a prerequisite for all his works. The Lucky One is no different -- it's a transparent, predictable soap opera -- and yet its earnestness makes it ever-so-slightly more palatable than literally all previous Sparks movies. Indeed, Hollywood may have discovered the secret to upgrading Sparks adaptations from execrable to merely mediocre.

Zac Efron stars as Logan Thibault (given the film's love for down-home values, I'm surprised they didn't dump the original spelling and just call him "Tebow"), a U.S. Marine who, after three tours of duty in Iraq, goes in search of an angel. To explain: Logan finds a picture in the rubble -- a picture of a blond, sun-kissed beauty. He carries it with him for the duration of his tour, searching in vain for its owner, and believing it to be his protector, his guardian. This is the basis for the entire story, and yet I've spent more time writing about it than the film spends establishing it.

Logan returns home, suffers a five-minute bout of post traumatic stress, and then decides to go find the angelic woman in the picture. He travels to North Carolina and takes a job at a local dog-grooming business that, as it turns out, is run by the angel herself. Beth (Taylor Schilling) is a fiercely independent single mother who runs the business, raises her young son (Riley Thomas Stewart), and finds time to go on long, creekside jogs. We first glimpse Beth as she emerges like an ethereal nymph, but she is battling her own inner demons -- the first is an entitled pig ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson) who refuses to stay out of her life, and the second is her brother, who died in combat. Like Logan, he was a Marine, and from there you can connect the dots.

The story wrings every last coincidence out of the plot, and the characters chart predictable paths from guarded courtship to ravishing romance, always looking over their shoulder as the villainous ex-husband lurks in the shadows. Plus, Logan continually harbors his "secret" picture, but telling his new girlfriend that he found her picture in Iraq is hardly a point of conflict, try as the screenplay might to use it as the faux conflict to carry the film into its third act.

For all his brooding beauty, Efron is actually a talented actor, and he is serviceable here despite leaning on some of his more grating affectations from time to time. Schilling is good, too -- so engaging that she often upstages all other characters and takes center stage even though the film is really Efron's story. The romance works in its very conventional way, and director Scott Hicks (Shine) lends some visual complexity that occasionally obscures the story's trite melodrama. So surprisingly effective is the acting and filmmaking that The Lucky One nearly seems palatable until it reaches is stormy, treacherous climax, which smothers us in all kinds of Nicholas Sparks until we can barely breathe. It is hardly laudable that a lugubrious romantic drama survives by being less excruciating than its predecessors, but in the case of this film, it is at least a tentative step forward into mild acceptability.

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