‘Dear John’ review

Nicholas Sparks makes teenage girls cry for a living: Look no further than the films inspired by his books, ‘The Notebook’ and ‘Walk to Remember’ for shameless tearjerkers. The latest film based on one of his novels, ‘Dear John’, pulls some fairly decent performances out of its young lead actors. That said, its a dull, repetitive offering that serves more as a list of things that happen, rather than an interesting, coherent plot.

The male lead, Channing Tatum isn’t a particularly skilled actor, although he has a very devoted fan-base amongst teenage girls. He simply mumbles his lines, in various tones according to what the scene demands. Amanda Seyfried, the female lead, is far better an actress, but her talent is essentially squandered here: What her role demands is as one-note as Tatum’s. Richard Jenkins so good in 2008’s ‘The Visitor’, is wasted here as the idiosyncratic father of John. The film is essentially a cycle of the same two characters meeting and leaving each other for increasingly melodramatic reasons.

John and Savannah meet on a West Virginia beach in 2001, and almost immediately fall in love. However, he’s a Special Forces soldier, and she’s in college, so soon they part ways. They correspond with letters over the years, only being together briefly.

The film has very little of an actual storyline, and never really has any dramatic closure. Honestly, it’s not so much an attempt at film-making as an attempt to manipulate one’s feelings. The film annoyingly eschews realism to make everything somehow positive. Cancer? Made into an inspirational plot point. 9/11? An excuse to keep the characters apart, but Channing Tatum is glad to re-enlist in the army.

‘Dear John’ is a really mediocre attempt to re-capture the magic of past romantic hits like ‘The Notebook’. It’s emotionally manipulative, the dialogue in this film frankly sucks, and although the performances aren’t terrible, there’s really nothing so interesting about them to as to deduce exactly why they are so deeply in love. There’s little reason to emotionally or financially invest in this mess.

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