Starring:Julliane Hough, Josh Duhamel, David Lyons and Cobie Smulders
Director: Lasse Hallstrom
Running time: 115 minutes
Released by: Momentum Pictures
Out: 1st February.
Erin (Juilliane Hough) is on the run, blood - literally - on her hands, her belongings in a small bag, her meagre life-savings in her purse and a weathered police detective Kevin Tierney (David Lyons) hot on her trail. Escaping from the wind-swept, rainy city streets she takes the midnight bus going anywhere...
During a pit-stop in North Carolina, she impulsively leaves the bus behind at the small North Carolina fishing town of Southport. This is the kind of community where everyone knows everyone else's business, but avoiding too many questions she changes her name to 'Katie', manages to get hired by the local cafe and meets Alex (Transformers' Josh Duhamel) the young, widowed father who runs the local fishing store while caring for his children Josh and Lexy. There's a clear attraction there, but Erin/Katie is no mood to put down too many roots and Josh hasn't been on the dating scene since his wife's death. Cue coy glances. Romance is, of course, inevitable, but so is the fact that Detective Tierney isn't about to give up and is soon closing in. With the truth bound to come out, can Erin escape her past or will she lose everything again?
As an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel (The Notebook, Dear John, The Lucky One and other titles that should come with a box of tissues and a health warning for diabetics) Safe Haven is a film as riddled with romance-novel cliches as the latest Die Hard is ridden with errant bullets - and to the same extent will find favour or mockery depending on your cinematic taste. This is the kind of film where an ingenue fugitive can ride a bus for several days and sleep under a pier and yet still emerge looking like the fresh-faced poster-girl for a shampoo commercial and skin-care products; the kind of story where no-one needs a national security number or references and where you can rent a spacious luxury cabin on the contents of your hurriedly-grabbed purse. In this seaside idyll, populated by beautiful people and cute ankle-biters for whom the 1950s wants visiting rights, we spend vast amounts of time watching awkward people deciding whether to awkwardly flirt with each other as they awkwardly overcome artificial obstacles and the insistence that the film should be stretched to nearly two hours. Inter-cut with this are the trials and tribulations of her pursuer with mounting clues that the original crime is not as clear-cut as we thought (or, y'know, didn't).
Okay, cynicism aside, Safe Haven is a perfectly acceptable if undemanding entry in a genre which seems to demand the same Sparks formula over and over again - a Mills & Boon fantasy for the negative-equity generation - and those who want their romance fix will find enough to mainline themselves into oblivion.
The undeniably beautiful cinematography, positively glowing cast and make-up department create the 'haven' of the title and one can't dispute that as escape-plans go, Erin's bolthole is a pretty heavenly backdrop. As a thriller it wants to be The Fugitive of date-movies, but ends up more akin to the Dawson's Creek of revenge sagas, moving from the potential thrill-of-the-chase to the travails of the heart whenever it possibly can, lingering more on batting eyelashes and chaste looks than plot logic. It does give us a couple of plot-twists that you may see coming depending on your expectations and knowledge of the genre - one of which is convenient but interesting and the other one that I smugly worked out just before it's reveal at the end, but still feels worthy of an Olympic eye-rolling medal. You either go with it or don't...
Released in the UK several weeks after St. Valentine's Day, for which it must have been bio-engineered, Safe Haven is just that, a competent but by-the-numbers effort from director Lasse Hallestrom and his picturesque cast... an inoffensive drama that never feels like it will inflict any more serious peril than a paper-cut or broken heart on its faithful. A souffle of cliche, but an escapist angel delight, go in knowing what to expect and you'll get what is says on the tin. However for the more discerning... justice proves to be bland.
7/10
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