MOVIE REVIEW: DEAR JOHN (2010)

The romance movie is as old as cinema itself. Many theatergoers enjoy a tale of building romance and overcoming obstacles that threaten to keep lovers apart. Over time, however, all genres run the risk of running out of new ideas, and romance has been among the hardest hit. While Nicholas Sparks has made a successful career out of recycling familiar romance story ingredients in his books, expanding his audience through film continues to be a tough sell. Dear John is only the third Spark’s adaptation I have seen, but I couldn’t help but feel like I had seen much of this sort of thing before.

Soldier John Tyree is badly wounded during combat in Afghanistan and blacks out after a voiceover professes his last thought about “you.” We then flash back to a few years before, when John meets a college student named Savannah while he is on leave in his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina in 2001. There is mutual attraction and they each introduce the other to some important people in their lives- John’s coin-obsessed father, and Savannah’s neighbor Tim and his autistic son. When his leave ends, John and Savannah commit to keeping their relationship alive by writing letters to each other. Time, and John’s deployment being extended by the 9/11 attacks strain an already complicated situation.

In the storied history of Hollywood, there have been many actors blessed with both good looks and acting chops capable of commanding the audience’s attention. Channing Tatum is not one of them. The best of his films utilize him in ways that accommodate for his limited range, but Dear John does not. As the star and romantic lead, this film asks too much of him. Yes, he’s fit; yes, he’s handsome; but his emotional range is flat, and any of his dialogue that conveys depth of thought feels forced. His counterpart in the film, Amanda Seyfried, suffers the opposite fate- she is under-utilized in a very generic role.

I mention the acting of our leading man first, because even a better script wouldn’t have produced much better results with him as the star. Don’t get me wrong- the script is a problem too. There are many components in this story that have been done before and better, which makes too much of Dear John predictable. The few unique ingredients, while initially interesting, wind up feeling like set dressing. Even the plot twists that come out of them feel predictable in time.

I don’t know if this is one of Sparks’s lesser novels or if it was just adapted poorly, but what we get here makes for a flawed and boring film that could have been 10 to 15 minutes shorter. This was the fifth Sparks adaptation to hit the big screen, and after the popularity of A Walk to Remember and The Notebook, I’m sure the filmmakers assumed a Sparks story and another pairing of young, popular, and good-looking actors would make for a guaranteed hit. Somewhere along the line, however, an executive should have delivered the director and Tatum a ‘Dear John’ letter of their own and sent this back for re-writes and re-casting.

FINAL RATING: 2.25 out of 5