Rating of
2/4
Give them credit for attempting
mrschu47912 - wrote on 10/26/10
There is somewhere Lasse Hallstrom can take his movies that few people in the industry can go without becoming too corny. What is the main reason he has been able to do this? By working with great actors. He has worked with some fantastic actors over the years, but unfortunately he does not in Dear John.
Now there are plenty of other things wrong with Dear John. It’s definitely predictable and clichéd, but I’m not going to go into that. I mean, when the movie is called Dear John, we can only assume its predictable. Actually I don’t think it ever tries to hide its predictability and this is a smart move by Hallstrom. After all think about it, if you don’t create a big revealing for a predictable twist, then you don’t think much of it and it feels more like a natural flow to the story.
I’m also glad it avoids melodramatic moments. I actually was waiting for it to come throughout the whole movie, but, to my surprise, it never came. This keeps the movie simpler as well as keeping us from feeling bad for the actors that are not talented enough to handle moments like that.
I did say earlier that there were not great actors involved, but that’s not true. Richard Jenkins actually gives an outstanding performance as Channing Tatum’s father. His performance is so good that I would bet that if he played that exact part in another movie that was not based off a Nicolas Sparks book and starred Anne Hathaway, then he would get award consideration.
Now I may sound here like I am giving this movie a good review, which I guess I am. But this is not a good movie. I only wanted to point out the rather pleasant attempts at making this movie worth something, rather than stating the millions of things wrong with every bad movie out there these days. It is still corny, predictable and clichéd, but it tries to avoid that. Unfortunately, it seems that these days I have to give films credit for just attempting to be good.
