Ah, Nicholas Sparks, the King of Happy Ever After. The poster boy for emotional manipulation from whose novel The Lucky One is adapted. He’s an evil cult leader who has tricked fanatic women everywhere into paying for soft-focus, Christian-themed snuff porn.
Even Zac Efron is better than this, and he made three High School Musical films. Efron plays Logan, an American Marine who discovers a photograph of a woman while on tour in Iraq, and comes to consider her his guardian angel.
Once safely returned home, he walks from Colorado to Louisiana and meets his angel Beth, played by Taylor Schilling. But unable to explain why he delusionally stalked – I mean, romantically searched for – her, he stays quiet and instead agrees to work with her in her dog-training school Along the way he meets her young son, her feisty grandmother Blythe Danner and her abusive ex-husband Jay R. Ferguson, who’s determined to keep Beth and Logan apart.
The film that ensues from all this is predictable, hokey and very manipulative. Avoid if you have a low threshold for Hollywood schmaltz.