At least Zac Efron is good with dogs. (WARNER BROS)
I’m beginning to think writer Nicholas Sparks isn’t one person at all, but a roomful of ladies doing Harlequin-romance Mad Libs. Occasionally they’ll hit a winning combination, as in the Sparks novel “The Notebook,” which yielded the shameless but sexy Ryan Gosling/Rachel McAdams flick. More often, you get eye-rollers like “The Lucky One,” the story of a bland Marine (Zac Efron) who falls for an equally bland blonde (Taylor Schilling) despite all the fill-in-the-blank problems keeping them apart.
Sgt. Logan Thibault (Efron) has just returned from his third tour of duty in Iraq, having survived while many of his comrades were blown to pieces. A photo of a mysterious woman, dropped in the rubble by an unknown soldier, became his good-luck charm there, and Logan aims to track down its subject.
She turns out to be Beth Green (Schilling), who manages her family’s dog kennel while mourning her brother’s death in the war and divorcing her bully of a husband (Jay R. Ferguson).
PHOTOS: ZAC EFRON AND OTHER DISNEY STARS BRANCHING OUT
Logan arrives on the scene, but somehow can’t bring himself to mention he’s carrying a photo of her — setting in place one of those only-in-movies miscommunications that make you want to yell at the screen. Instead, he takes a job at the kennel and slowly works his way into Beth’s heart. (Do you think she’ll eventually find the photo? She’ll probably be totally cool with that, right?)
For no discernible reason, single-mom Beth is slow to warm up to the muscular serviceman, who’s good with kids, dogs and gutter repair. But she eventually melts, leading to some discreetly gauzy sex against a wall.
Blythe Danner, as Beth’s folksy grandmother, exists mostly to dispense adages about appreciating life in the moment, and the occasional ribald aside — as when she catches her daughter onanistically soaping a dishpan while gazing out the window at Logan lifting heavy objects.
Efron does fill out the hunky-guy uniform nicely. He’s no longer the scrawny teen from “High School Musical.” But despite his promise in smaller movies like “Me and Orson Welles,” here he’s all flat affect, taking bottled-up angst to an extreme where you never actually see it. He’s perfectly likable but never riveting, dropping the ball on the chance to portray the complicated psychology of a war veteran. Apart from one early scene in which he flinches at a video-game shooting, you never have the sense he’s dealing with combat repercussions.
The very blue-eyed Schilling (“Atlas Shrugged”) is devoid of the spunkiness needed to make her character palatable, adrift as she is in a sea of you-saw-it-coming plot points. And she’s really done in by the hackish dialogue: On a date, when she takes Logan’s hand and says, “I want to show you something,” you almost can’t believe when she follows it up with: “This is where I come when I want to be alone.” (Why are characters always saying this to someone else they’ve brought there?)
Beth’s ex, the town sheriff, is a mean-spirited jerk to Logan upon first meeting. Who’d have thought he’d be back later on to do something terrible? Absolutely everyone, that’s who. And even for a jilted lover, his treatment of Logan seems implausibly harsh: Would a policeman really jeer a Marine just back from Iraq with the moniker “soldier boy”?
Director Scott Hicks (“No Reservations”) presumably understands this is a Grade-A, unapologetic chick flick. So it’s a mystery why he doesn’t make the material either more titillating or more tear-jerking. In the absence of R-rated clinches or over-the-top melodrama (what’s up, “A Walk To Remember”?), the most enjoyable thing about this Sparks adaptation may be its slow-mo dog-grooming montage.