Main cast: Mandy Moore (Jamie Sullivan), Shane West (Landon Carter), Peter Coyote (Reverend Sullivan), and Daryl Hannah (Cynthia Carter)
Director: Adam Shankman
I realized too late – right after I’ve planted my butt on the theater seat – that this movie is a loose adaptation of that Nicholas Sparks‘s piece of crap book. I can’t scream my “Holy Mary Mother of Jesus!” loud enough.
The book is set in the 1950s, when people don’t have sex and live in scenery right out of a Thomas Kinkade artwork, but the movie is set in current day, in an alternate universe where kids don’t have sex and the coolest thing in school is the annual morality play. Someone kill me now.
Shane West, who is more well-known as the irritating Eli in TV’s Once and Again, plays Landon Carter, a bad boy because he drinks a lot. He does bad things too, and he goes too far one day and gets sentenced to play a role in a play. Eeeuw. Give me alcohol any day. There, he meets lovely “plain Jane” Jamie Sullivan (Mandy Moore… plain?) who then teaches him the meaning of love. They watch comets. They lie together, maybe kiss and neck a bit, but Jamie, a preacher’s daughter who wants no sex until she is married in that church where her late Momma got married – KILL ME SOMEBODY, PLEASE! – doesn’t let Landon go any further.
Ten points deducted for the absence of sex scenes to ease my agony.
It is nice to see Peter Coyote on screen again, and he makes Shane West and Mandy Moore even stiffer than they actually are in the acting department. Mr West and Ms Moore play one-dimensional cardboard cover boy and girl of Seventeen adequately, but their romance is so prepubescent and juvenile that it’s corny.
And of course, hammy and atrocious dialogues rule the day. I wonder how the cast can mouth those lines without bursting into fits of laughter – maybe the blooper reels will be more watchable.
A Walk to Remember preaches with all the enthusiasm of a two-bit preacher overdosed on Hallmark daytime sap, and the wooden cast and ridiculous dialogues only complete the grand picture of snooze-inducing dullness. This movie is perfect for preteen girls still dreaming of Shane West marrying them 4eva and adults looking for G-rated sex-free throwbacks to morality and clean wholesome movies, never mind the crappiness of it all. Hey, some people I know will instantly love anything that has no sex but has lots of unsubtle preachings and a melodramatic tearjerker ending. Yo, people, this one’s for you.
