IT BROKE Avatar’s No. 1 box-office streak by being a girls-night-out alternative to the Super Bowl. I hope the ladies enjoyed themselves, but Dear John is as ripe as a baby’s onesie. Any woman who went to ogle a shirtless Channing Tatum—who looks like Frankenstein’s monster built by the J. Crew staff—is in no position to complain about we men, who might point out we really didn’t get enough undraped Amanda Seyfried—and the movie was shot at the beach, yet. Be ashamed, Lasse Hallström: Swedish directors used to be known for sensuality. When Seyfried goes swimming, the camera is 150 feet away. It’s the same distance from which we see Tatum give his big scene: a moment of getting angry at the accusation that his character’s father has Asperger’s syndrome. Ironic—Tatum has all of those muscles, and yet he can’t do any heavy lifting, to use actors’ slang. Dear John doesn’t give him a place to hide, no matter how far back Hallström puts the camera.
Dear John is based on Nicholas Sparks’ epistle romance between a big, shy lug of a Green Beret named John Tyree (Tatum) and Savannah Curtis (Seyfried), a well-off college girl who lives by the beach in South Carolina. She’s surrounded by the kind of partying wastrels who like to take a swing at a kill-trained soldier (why?). Savannah herself is a good girl who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke and doesn’t sleep around: “In my mind, there’s a never-ending string of swear words,” she says, when Tyree asks if she’s too good to be true. Despite the good breeding, upon the first kiss with Tatum she wraps her legs around him like he’s a brass stripper pole. Tyree begs Savannah to wait for her while his tour of duty ends. Then Sept. 11 strikes: a choice between his country and Amanda Seyfried. There is a shooting, as we see in the opening. There is the father with Asperger’s (Richard Jenkins, underplaying for a while; then, seeking a big moment, he goes full Rain Man). There’s also a kid with autism, who indicates this syndrome by acting like Alvin Chipmunk.
If I were Sparks, I would have added the dreaded wound from The Sun Also Rises. It’s not like people who read my schlock would know about Hemingway, and such an unmanning would only help Sparks’ aversion to anything but the one tender sex scene—so tender the leads look like they fell asleep in the saddle. Watching this film, in my mind there was a never-ending string of swear words. The Forever War is cornstarch to hold this batter together—the movie shuns female curves and goes full porno on the fuselages of cargo planes instead. Hallström does a few things neat—a matching shot between a fountain of brass shell casings and tumbling of coins at the mint. The coin smithing is Sparks’ usual reference to craftsmanship, despite plots that seem to have been assembled in a Chinese sweatshop on their way to sale at Wal-Mart.
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
DEAR JOHN (PG-13; 105 min.), directed by Lasse Hallström, written by Jamie Linden, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks, photographed by Terry Stacey and starring Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, plays valleywide.
