The Best of Me

It says here that one of us will die. I sure hope

somebody else is playing us when it happens.

Grade: C –

Director: Michael Hoffman

Starring: Michelle Monaghan, James Marsden, Luke Bracey, Liana Liberato and Gerald McRaney

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 57 min.

The character names may change, but Nicholas Sparks romance porn follows the same formula: a young boy and young girl fall in-and-out-and-back-in love amid some moss-covered Southern setting, then someone dies and there’s a tear-jerker twist. Cut, print it, that’s a wrap.

The latest installment from Sparks’ melodrama machine is The Best of Me, in which former high school sweethearts Dawson (James Marsden) and Amanda (Michelle Monaghan) are forced to reunite back in their small Louisiana hometown after the death of Tuck (Gerald McRaney, the film’s lone highlight), Dawson’s gruff but kindly adoptive father.

The timeline oscillates between Dawson and Amanda’s uneasy reunion and the beginnings of their high school romance 21 years earlier. There Dawson (played by Luke Bracey) is a hunky kid from a white trash, meth-cooking clan. But Dawson is “different,” denoted by the fact that we see him reading Physics textbooks and, later as an adult, “The Grand Design” by Stephen Hawking. After getting his fill of physical abuse, Dawson runs away and it taken by Tuck, an ex-Marine widower with an arsenal of rifles and a carefully cultivated flower garden.

Dawson’s checkered family doesn’t stop rich girl Amanda (played by Liana Liberato) from almost obsessively pursuing him. Of course, she’s in no way dazzled by his tousled locks and ripped abs. She likes him because he’s “different.” Amanda’s father doesn’t quite see it that way and unsuccessfully attempts to buy Dawson out of seeing his daughter, an offer that casts dad as a villain despite the reasoned position that he doesn’t want his little girl dating the son of drug-dealing, backwoods rednecks.

The only bit of intrigue involves learning what split up these lovebirds and how high Sparks’ body count will eventually rise. There’s also some schoolyard-grade masochism where it’s OK to cheat on your husband if he’s a rich nebbish who drinks too much and likes golf, and your paramour sports a perpetual two-day beard, drives pickup trucks and did four years in prison.

The narrative treads water until its howler of a climax, which I haven’t the “heart” to reveal but suffice it to say it’s so cloying it cements the film’s status as Sparks self-parody.

The November Man

Shouldn't that be a dumpster on fire?

Grade: C +

Director: Roger Donaldson

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Luke Bracey, Olga Kurylenko, Bill Smitrovich, Amila Terzimehic, Eliza Taylor and Will Patton

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 48 min.

The November Man is better than most, if not all of Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond efforts. Unfortunately, clearing that low hurdle isn’t much of an accomplishment.

Adapted from Bill Granger’s spy thriller novel “There Are No Spies,” the film boasts Brosnan, a venerable actor seemingly primed for a resurgence, and Roger Donaldson, a director well-suited to the genre with such credits as No Way Out, Thirteen Days, and The Bank Job. The two previously worked together in the volcano disaster flick Dante’s Peak.

Sadly, this prestige veneer covers an unstable foundation built upon an unnecessarily convoluted plot, cut-rate supporting cast and misogynistic undertow.

Peter Devereaux (Brosnan) is a skilled ex-CIA agent lured out of semi-retirement in Switzerland for professional and personal reasons to protect Alice (Olga Kurylenko), a relief worker filled with valuable and dangerous information … information you’ll tie your brain into a pretzel wondering why she didn’t share with the world far before the events in this film.

It’s all about CIA black ops in league with Russian nerdowells to once trigger a Czechian rebellion. So, there’s a Russian politician with a hidden past (Lazar Ristovski), duplicitous CIA minders (Bill Smitrovich and Will Patton) and a skilled but sexy female assassin (Amila Terzimehic).

The film aims to explicate the psychology of spies and machinations of geopolitics. But it utterly muddles the latter while failing to flesh out the former. Unending diatribes about international power and politics end up sounding like hollow filler. Meanwhile, the overly twisty plot smacks of a screenwriter weaned on a steady diet of John le Carré novels.

Devereaux is also chased by David Mason (Luke Bracey, lifeless), his estranged former CIA protégé. Devereaux calls Mason “the best friend I ever I had” at one point, which conflicts with every other scene in the film suggesting Devereaux never cared much for Mason personally or professionally. It’s much like all the characterizations in the film, which are described instead of being developed.

At one point, Devereaux slashes the femoral artery of a woman close to Mason, ostensibly to teach Mason another lesson about the dangers of letting human ties interfere with your secret agent status (a lesson we discover Devereaux ignored himself). It’s a wholly unnecessary scene, and we never hear from the hapless lady again after she’s carted to the hospital. She’s but one casualty of the film’s disposable, if not outright antagonistic attitude toward women, who are constantly couched as mere objects for abuse, derision and sexual conquest.

It’d be nice to see The November Man as the James Bond film Donaldson never got to make, cast with a former 007 and Bond Girl (Kurylenko from Quantum of Solace) looking to rectify past misfires. Unfortunately, the film is the cinematic equivalent of jogging on a treadmill—it raises your pulse, but ultimately it doesn’t go anywhere.