The usual.........all Beloved Daughter needed to hear was the tagline "If you love Nicholas Sparks movies...." and off we zipped to the Multiplex, which properly installed this movie in its tiniest auditorium........a 50 seater, but sporting a huge curved screen........sit in the second row and it's almost your own little IMAX den.......
Let's state at the outset that we admire the jumbo brass balls of this movie's distributor........footing the bill for a nationwide theatrical opening of what's basically a slightly spiffier Hallmark Channel movie.......
The producers evidently decided that the audiences who once flocked to the film adaptations of Nicholas Sparks' tortured romance novels hungered for more.......
Hmm......questionable. The Sparks movie empire crumbled from ever decreasing box office and ever decreasing quality.........the films rolling off the Sparks assembly line had a tired, formulaic stench about them. And besides, audiences could wallow in loads of this type of stuff on the Lifetime and Hallmark channels......without buying a ticket.
So we salute the "Forever My Girl" bunch for plunging ahead anyway into the fiercely competitive shark tank of theatrical films.....
Story? That all-time favorite of romance books and films......the Second Chance Redemption.
Returning home to his little Hallmark-y everybody-knows-everybody town, Liam embarks on a slow steady path to win back Josie's hurtin' heart.....
Oh, did we forget to mention that Country Stud has to also bond with Josie's painfully precocious 7 year old daughter, the spawn of the seed he left in Josie just before he skipped town?
Well, now you know........
And it's a hard, bumpy road for our remorseful hometown hottie, since the film implies that his years of celebrity have left him as socially infantile as a kid raised by wolves.....
No need to go on any further here.........anyone who cares enough to watch this film knows exactly how it's going to sort out, even before the corporate logos appear at the very start.
What else can we say? The cast didn't annoy us much, the country songs were pleasantly okay, and the film looks slickly put together. And to its everlasting credit, it doesn't necessarily follow the carved-in-stone, untouchable plot progression of a Hallmark movie......(it's allowed to breathe a little, you know.....like a real movie....)
Beloved Daughter adored it (also a forgone conclusion).......we merely.....survived it....if ever a movie defined the phrase "it is what it is".....it's this one. 2 stars (**).
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