Zac Efron plays a young Iraq war vet who believes that a good luck charm-a pretty picture of a woman he doesn’t know-is the key to his not dying in battle. a military story and something about dogs? Forever consumed by the idea of everyday magic and twisted fate, Sparks’s 2012 feature combined those elements with. Sparks’s interest in military men might have been a tangential part of The Notebook, but it served as a looming plot point in both Dear John and The Lucky One, which hit theaters two years later. Also, there’s a fire, just for good measure.
It speaks to the disposability of Sparks’s supporting characters that no one ever really looked askance at Cobie Smulders’s Jo, a friendly neighborhood gal that only Julianne Hough’s Katie ever spoke to, allowing her to eventually reveal herself as not just a friendly ghost, but the ghost of Katie’s paramour’s dead wife. Rarely, however, has Sparks employed an actual ghost to further his narratives, which is what makes the twist of the 2013 feature film so shocking. So many of Sparks’s various heroes and heroines are the victims of memories that just won’t go away, emotional poltergeists that manifest as “secrets” and “lies” and “total misunderstandings that would really easily be cleared up by having a good chat.” The inevitable twist of many Sparks tales-if it’s not surprise cancer, because it’s often surprise cancer-is some sort of past occurrence that rears its ugly head at inopportune moments (like when our fated couple is finally about to embrace true happiness and/or make out in a country shed). Sparks’s stories have always been preoccupied with ghosts, though the author’s ethereal beings have typically been of the purely psychological variety. It’s probably just that the whole thing is retread and its apparent twists-disease-involved or not-can’t even jolt the most dedicated viewer. Maybe it’s that we’re supposed to believe that young Luke Bracey grows up to be old James Marsden or that, again, there’s a subplot about meth dealers. Still, for all its kitchen-sink bits and pieces, the whole thing just doesn’t work. It is also the only Sparks feature to include a subplot about meth dealers, so at the very least, it aims for an air of salacious, ripped-from-the-headlines debauchery. Someone drinks a lot and is a real jerk about it. People are offered money to abandon their lovers. There are car accidents and gardens and candlelit dinners.
Like a hideous Frankenstein’s monster of recycled plot points, The Best of Me has it all, from fated teenage sweethearts to disapproving parents, to kindly old people, to a merciless disease. The latest cinematic offering culled from the Sparks oeuvre, this 2014 outing is rife with Mad Libs–styled Sparks elements that make it almost impossible to differentiate from any of his other films.
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