Safe Haven

 

I despised just about everything that happened during Safe Haven. It's so awful and wretched you would swear you were watching the devil's valentine's day card. It's so gooey it would melt through your hand.

What's up? Julliane Hough stars as Katie, a woman who has just fleed her abusive relationship, ending up in North Carolina. Things are looking down, but with the help of Alex (Josh Duhamel) and her new neighbor; Jo (Cobie Smulders from How I Met Your Mother) things are starting to look up, which is always a sign that something is bad is coming, such as Katie's boyfriend/husband whatever he was, who isn't done with her just yet.

What's good? I would be greatly lying if I really enjoyed much about Safe Haven at all, but there is a nice last minute twist involving Alex's wife that I actually thought was a bit surprising. If the movie had done more with the twist for the first 15,000 hours of the duration, I might have enjoyed it more. The scenes in North Carolina are beautiful as well, if the movie was 2 minutes long without any dialogue I would recommend it in a heartbeat.

What the fuck? This is one of those movies that is a complete disaster to me, but one of the biggest issues I had is the romance itself.

For one, there isn't a consistent flow to this movie at all. I feel like editing needed to be tightened here. This is one of those movies that makes characters change their actions and motivations within a matter of seconds. For example, when first arriving in North Carolina, Katie can barely stand even looking at Alex, but in the next scene she's making googly eyes at him as if they had been married forever? The leads display 0% chemistry and both share as much excitement in their personalities as a bag.

But then again, it's hard to display a convincing romance with dialogue like this. Safe Haven is one of those movies that throws every romantic cliche at the screen in the hopes that fans will eat it up. I was very unmoved to say the least, everything feels forced and unconvincing, almost like no one was trying to actually make a quality romance.

And for a movie with themes involving murder, spirits, abuse, and domestic violence, Safe Haven plays it as tame as possible it's quite bizzare imagining who this movie was intended for. Those in the single digit ages probably wouldn't be allowed to see it and anyone over 12 would be in a coma by the end. Safe Haven is 115 minutes long but the ideas can be wrapped up on a post it.

Overall Safe Haven just feels incredibly lazy. It does nothing with the story, nothing with the actors, it drags, it lags, the editing feels schizophrenic and the whole thing feels like it was being sold by a bad telemarketer. It's a common belief these days that romance is dead and movies like Safe Haven will never stand up to prove otherwise.

1/4