Safe Haven [Review by Haus]

Safe Haven is a rare breed: A film so bad it’s actually sort of good.

It’s a cliche, I know, and one I don’t employ too much — chiefly because I think it’s often used improperly to soften an otherwise correct condemnation of a truly virtueless piece of junk. The Lucky One, for instance, is not “so bad it’s good” — it is just a wretched, steaming, hopeless failure. And like The Lucky One, Safe Haven is based on a Nicholas Sparks book. For those keeping track, that’s the same Nicholas Sparks who supplied us with The Notebook. (His own notebook being, incidentally, where such stories should properly remain.)

The story is as follows. Julianne Hough plays a battered Boston pollyanna who hops a Greyhound and flees to a wholly imagined down-home idyll in seaside North Carolina. Here she admires some sunsets, frequents a homey convenience store, lands a job as a waitress, and rents a “fixer upper” cabin the middle of the woods, apparently never noticing that the town — which looks fairly substantial from aerial shots — appears to be populated by only five people. She promptly falls in love with the first person she meets, a kind, rugged, solid, and wholly unrealistic widower played by Josh Duhamel. He and his two children — including the mandatory “troubled” preteen boy — occupy the same seaside convenience store / gas station / house, the upper floor of which is preserved as a strange shrine to Duhamel’s departed wife. Initially wary of his hamhanded but innocent aw-shucks affections, Hough soon finds herself propelled into Duhamel’s arms in predictable fashion, rainstorm and all.  This all seems to agree with Cobie Smulders, Hough’s arbitrary hot neighbor in the woods. Meanwhile, Hough is hunted by a fanatically dedicated police detective for whatever mysterious crime caused her to flee in the first place.

And that’s where it all gets stupid. The detective is one-dimensional and manic, and you’ll figure out his true motivations about fifteen minutes before the film thinks you should. Duhamel is wholesome, chiseled, allegedly wounded, and just too perfect. Hough is skittish around noisy espresso machines, wears full Oscar makeup while canoeing in a rainstorm, and looks impossibly fetching in her short shorts and tank tops. And together the protagonists occupy a kind of narcissistic fantasy land: Every indistinct secondary character blends into a sort of chorus of cooing and nurturing, circling the small-town Wagons of Authenticity around the Beautiful Duo like a dust bowl-era eugenics display.

Even the love story — something you’d think Sparks could handle — is jumpy, forced and ridiculous. Duhamel does his level best with this material, but there’s only so much you can do with a character who says “I love you” out of nowhere. And he gets no help from Hough, whose flat delivery looks rather appealing when compared with her scattered attempts at emotion, evidenced by a series of grotesque expressions even Lasse Hallström had to cut away from. This is the man who directed some serious facial contortions in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. (Now, Hough is an admitted hottie who got her start on Dancing with the Stars. There are undoubtedly many fine tools in her toolbox, but there’s perhaps a reason she was a Dancer and not a Star?)

Beware: I will at this point depart from my usual practice of avoiding spoilers. I do this because if you see this film, you will find that your enjoyment is not diminished by foreknowledge of a Swiss-cheese plot and perhaps the most pointless twist ending in any romance ever.

Cobie Smulders strangely never interacts with anyone besides Hough — at one point, she waits outside a store while Hough goes in — and it was at this juncture that I whispered my newfound theory that she was in fact the ghost of Duhamel’s wife. I should stress that I was mostly joking when I said this, because this film couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to …

But it could! It did! COBIE IS INDEED A GHOST, and when this grand reveal finally came I thrust both fists in the air in pure triumph. Not that it mattered in the slightest. This, gentle reader, is the rarest breed of cinematic haunting: the totally pointless. This Cobie-ghost did nothing of any consequence. It didn’t push people out of harm’s way, it didn’t supply wisdom from beyond the grave, it wasn’t scary. It wasn’t even important to the story, except inasmuch as Cobie was part of Duhamel’s backstory. A superfluous ghost with no agency and no purpose, whose entire raison d’etre is made redundant by a handwritten letter that the protagonist would have received anyway.

So what’s going on here? It seems Nicholas Sparks, no longer content to pen maudlin and forced romances with nothing edgier than rain-kisses, has decided to create a thriller. And it appears that said thrills are to be obtained by juxtaposing aforementioned rain-kisses with strangely violent cut-scenes of an alcoholic, single-minded misogynistic Bad Guy husband, blending with equal parts Cape Fear and Enough, and garnishing with M. Night Shyamalan‘s table leavings.

The result is egregiously and painfully unrealistic, has all the depth of an afternoon TV movie, and makes virtually no sense on its own terms. The performances are bland and its halfhearted attempts to thrill are doomed from the get go. But it has some accidentally hilarious moments, and on the whole I confess I rather enjoyed watching it. And just so we’re clear, this result was in no way dictated by Hough’s nose-art good looks or very short shorts.

HAUS VERDICT: A Nicholas Sparks thriller? It’s a Splenda-sweet romantic mocktail that tries too hard at everything and does nothing very well.