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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

The Best Of Me

THE BEST OF ME (Michael Hoffman). 117 minutes. Opens Friday (October 17). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN


The Best of Me, the latest movie from a novel by peddler of moss-covered romance Nicholas Sparks, hews insipidly close to The Notebook, the author’s first and most successful story about kissing in the rain.

Once again, an older couple trips down memory lane to rekindle the passion of their youth. Instead of the twilight-aged James Garner and Gena Rowlands from The Notebook, a chiselled, slightly grey James Marsden and a still-looks-good-in-panties Michelle Monaghan play the senior couple here. This basically allows the movie to double down on the requisite fawning.

As the young and old versions of Dawson Cole, a quiet, noble lad born from white trash, both Luke Bracey and Marsden get to whip off their shirts, strut their abs and perform intensive gardening, taking hand and shovel to fertile soil while sweating in the glistening Southern sunset.

They are joined under the rose bush by Amanda (Monoghan and a Taylor Swift doppelgänger named Liana Liberato), who, like all Sparks’s heroines, dives into the relationship with Dawson despite his cartoonish, despicable criminal family and her rich daddy’s objections.

As you’d expect from films of the novelist’s work, which have become their own clichés, a tragedy will strike, children will be put in peril, destiny will make amends, and every Budweiser moment between the couple, young and old, will look like it’s been shot by unemployed wedding photographers.

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