The Lucky One

Directed by Scott Hicks

(PG-13)

*

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This latest adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance novel is as “gauzily soft and disposable as the tissues” that its target audience will want to bring along, said Alison Willmore in Movieline.com. Unfortunately, it “never reaches the grandly melodramatic heights” of 2004’s The Notebook, drawn from an earlier Sparks novel. Zac Efron stars here as an Iraq War veteran who’s journeyed many miles to find the young woman in a photo that he credits with saving his life. Yet he’s finished his search by the opening credits, then endlessly delays doing whatever he came to do, apparently because she “looks so lovely in soft-focus sunsets,” said Steve Persall in the Tampa Bay Times. Director Scott Hicks tries, without much success, to fill the script’s empty places with montages and musical interludes. Efron, the former teen heartthrob, “still projects a one-dimensional handsomeness,” while his co-star, Taylor Schilling, adds little but “the well-scrubbed prettiness of a country pop star,” said David Fear in Time Out New York. In a way, they’re “the perfect stars” for this movie, a banal love story “that leaves you with no impression whatsoever.”