Safe Haven

Do you hear banjos playing, too?

Grade: C +
Director: Lasse Hallström
Starring: Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel, David Lyons, Cobie Smulders and Mimi Kirkland
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 55 min.

There are three essential elements to a Nicholas Sparks’ story: death, tears and North Carolina. Safe Haven, the eighth Sparks film adaptation but only the third filmed entirely in the Tar Heel state (following A Walk to Remember and Nights in Rodanthe), is set in the sleepy real-life village of Southport, situated at the confluence of the Cape Fear River, Intracoastal Waterway and Atlantic Ocean. We see depictions of open-air restaurants along the marsh, nights spent gigging for fish and a recreation of the town’s renowned annual Fourth of July festival.

This idyllic setting is also the impromptu hideaway for “Katie” (Julianne Hough), the assumed name adopted by a perky blond on the run from flashbacks of a bloody knife and a prone victim, along with Kevin, an alcoholic Boston detective (David Lyons) giving dogged chase. Katie wants to lay low, so naturally she rents a remote, delipidated shack that everyone knows about, which needs repairs that send Katie trodding into the middle of town every day in search of supplies.

No bother—Katie is immediately embraced by the natives, particularly Alex (Josh Duhamel), a 30-something widower and father who looks like, well, Josh Duhamel. Despite knowing little about Katie (like her true identity, for starters), the wanted poster with her face on it hanging in the local police station (this film isn’t very kind to the Southport PD) and the fact that she attracts all manner of mayhem to town, Alex decides Katie is the one to replace his recently deceased wife and raise his two moppets, including a daughter played by Raleigh native Mimi Kirkland.

In fairness, there’s enough chemistry between Duhamel and Hough to carry this Hallmark Movie Channel refugee through its many banal patches. Director Lasse Hallström—helming his second Sparks adaptation (Dear John)—competently captures the beatific coastal tableaux, although his crosscuts to Kevin’s manic search back in faux-Boston are drab filler.

Still, while there’s the proverbial death along the way, you nearly make it through without any tears … until a jaw-dropping, Shyamalan-ian denouement that’s just as liable to prompt eye-rolling as it is to send sniffles echoing throughout the theater. Ultimately, the big beneficiary here is the Southport-Oak Island Area Chamber of Commerce. The rest of Safe Haven plays it safe.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Somebody say they needed 1.21 gigawatts?

Grade: D +

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.

The greatest trick Michael Bay ever pulled was making his last Transformers movie so godawful that virtually any follow-up would look superlative by comparison. While Bay excises most (but not all) of the hip-hop “humor” that sullied Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he amps up the decibels and bumptiousness for Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers 3).

As the film opens, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and the Autobots roam the planet as a phalanx for American foreign policy – we watch them destroy an “illegal nuclear facility” in some nameless Arab country. Meanwhile, Decepticon leader Megatron (Hugh Weaving) has been reduced to a desert-dwelling raghead patiently plotting his next terrorist incursion.

Opportunity comes in the form a Cybertronian ship whose crash landing on the moon in the early 1960s was the actual impetus for the U.S.-Soviet space race (this historical tie-in includes a shuffle-through by Buzz Aldrin himself). Found aboard the craft are a collection of gizmos designed to teleport Cybertron into Earth’s orbit (we never really know why) together with the dormant hulk of former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime, voiced by Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy’s inclusion provides the film’s lone moment of cleverness when a couple of slacker bots watch the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek TV series and, in a bit of foreshadowing, describe it as “the one where Spock goes crazy.”

Once again the Decepticons and their allies threaten mankind while political leaders opt for appeasement, exiling the Autobots and removing their soldiers from the battlefield in hopes that the enemy will just leave them alone. Instead, the Decepticons launch an offensive to secure world domination, headlined by a rampage through downtown Chicago that does more damage to the Windy City than Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Transformers 3 shamelessly assimilates the vernacular and imagery of Sept. 11 (Chi-town is “Ground Zero”), refracted through Bay’s interpretation of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, Holocaust, and Neville Chamberlain. And if toppled skyscrapers aren’t discomforting enough, inexplicable recurring hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) discovers the Decepticons are out to steal your women, too. As Sam’s new girlfriend Carly, ex-Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (subbing for the suddenly sage Megan Fox) primarily sports tight jeans and purses her pursed, collagen-filled lips while standing in front of a green-screen full of explosions and other assorted carnage.

Bay’s literal and figurative flag-waving would be fine if his film was any good. The Bush Doctrine overtones in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are suitable because they’re packaged in first-rate vehicles. By contrast, Transformers 3 an orgy of dizzying, interminable special effects and right-wing allegory set to Wagneresque blaring brass of composer Steve Jablonsky. You pray for periodic flashes of color in order to tell one shape-shifting robot from another – at one point, four indistinguishable silver robots are caught in a Mexican standoff. Bay’s tone-deaf notion of humor is Sam’s mom taking time during the End of Days to chat with her adult son about how to satisfy a woman.

The rest of the window-dressing is equally vapid and useless. Save for Carly's collaboration with Bay’s leering camera, there’s not a single supporting character whose presence would be missed, but there are a whole lot of actors that should know better. They include a gonzo corporate exec (John Malkovich), a NSA ramrod (Frances McDormand), McDreamy as a car collector (Patrick Dempsey), a crazy Asian (Ken Jeong, natch), a conspiracy nut (John Turturro, again), and invincible super soldiers Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson.

In Bay’s reality, Bill O’Reilly passes for a celebrity cameo and a medal awarded by President Obama for saving the world isn’t enough to get Sam a job as a mail room clerk. “We’re pretty much all Republicans around here,” quips one company headhunter, channeling his director and his loud, jingoistic polemic for neo-con U.S. geopolitics. Transformers 3: Mission not accomplished.

Neil Morris

When in Rome

Totally abulous

Grade: F

Director: Mark Steve Johnson

Starring: Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Anjelica Huston, Will Arnett, Jon Heder, Dax Shepard, Bobby Moynihan, and Danny DeVito

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 25 minutes

In the timewaster When in Rome, Josh Duhamel plays a sportswriter whose erstwhile football career ended when he was struck by lightning during a game. Amazingly, this ultimately irrelevant factoid is not the strangest part of this awful film – not by a long shot.

For starters, this latest cinematic IED from “director” Mark Steven Johnson (Ghost Rider; Daredevil) is another incarnation of the insidiously fashionable premise of the hardnosed, talented working girl whose life is nonetheless an abject failure because she hasn’t gotten hitched yet. Let me say it here and now – henceforth, no film with this plotline will ever get a positive review out of me.

Oh, if only the incompetence stopped there. While in Rome for her sister’s whirlwind wedding to a stereotypical Italian hot-blood, Beth (Kristen Bell) – a chronically single New York City-based art curator – meets-cute with the hunk of her dreams, Nick (Josh Duhamel), at least until Beth spies Nick smooching some bella donna. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the Italian lady in the red dress will turn out to be some friend or relative, and, thus, where the story of Beth and Nick is headed.

That, however, is when the banal turns bizarre. In a fit of self-pity, Beth pilfers three “magic” coins (and one poker chip) out of a Fountain of Love. Seems idiotic legend holds that doing so means the person who tossed it in will fall hopelessly in love with you.

Set aside the crippling coincidence that the four coins Beth pinches all belong to men living in New York City. What is just as off-putting as the folly that a woman is eternally deficient until she has a man steering her life’s ship is the notion that any man consumed with undying love is essentially a stalker. In Beth’s imbroglio, she must suffer the obsessive affections of a street magician (Jon Heder), an Italian sketch artist (Will Arnett), a sausage magnate (Danny De Vito), and an ad body model (Dax Shepard, the lone oasis in this comedic wasteland), all whom are able to track Beth down whenever and wherever.

Whose love is for real? Will Beth and Nick get together? How will I ever get back the 85-felt-like-185 minutes I spent watching this junk? Of course, what else should you expect besides a cinematic cow pie from the screenwriting team that brought us The Family Man, Evolution, and the retched Old Dogs?

This film’s surreal tenor is a slipshod stab at a Bollywood-style romantic farce, an allusion driven home by the song-and-dance routine the cast performs over the closing credits, which is a Bollywood staple. It’s the best part of When in Rome – the actors finally seem to be having some fun, and the audience finally gets to bolt for the theater exit.

Neil Morris