Movie review: 'The Lucky One' (VIDEO)

“The Lucky One,” starring Zac Efron as an Iraq war veteran, is the latest piece of noble schmaltz adapted from a Nicholas Sparks novel.

Hollywood has grown to love Sparks over the past decade, and why not? His books are cheap to adapt, and the bestselling author’s name on a poster guarantees a sizable female audience on opening weekend. Those faithful turned one of Sparks’ novels, “The Notebook,” into a genuine blockbuster.

So until Sparks starts writing about giant robots or other subjects that entail an extensive special effects budget, Hollywood will gladly keep adapting books by this Stephen King of sap.

Once you get past the premise of “The Lucky One” (and this film gets past it with surprising speed) this is a bare-bones, predictable story even for an earnest romance.

After the characters are in place and their inner problems delineated, you can easily guess how the tale will play out. It becomes a matter of waiting for the key events, which you already know, to occur.

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Efron plays Logan Thibault, a Marine in Iraq sitting on one pile of rubble when he notices something shiny in another pile of rubble. He walks over and discovers this object is a wallet-sized photo of a pretty young blonde. He turns the photo over hoping to find her name, but instead sees the words “Be safe.”

Just then a mortar shell falls on the pile of rubble he was sitting on 30 seconds earlier. If Logan hadn’t spotted the photo, he’d be dead. To underscore this, another Marine appears to say, “Looks like you’ve got yourself a guardian angel.”

Logan believes the woman saved his life. When he returns to the states, he resolves to find her and thank her. Although the odds against locating an unknown woman seem staggering, Logan is knocking on her door before the opening titles end.

Her name is Beth (Taylor Schilling). She lives in a tiny town deep in Louisiana’s bayous and owns a dog hotel, just to make the movie that much more adorable. Logan is about to tell her his story when she gets one of those phone calls common in movies and television, the kind that interrupt deeply important statements.

When she gets off the phone, Beth reappraises Logan and says, “You must be here about the job.” And so Logan holds off on thanking her and is hired on as dog hotel handyman.

“The Lucky One,” then, is structured like a story that revolves around a misunderstanding or dark secret. But this barely qualifies as a misunderstanding, and while Logan is keeping a secret, it’s hardly a dark one.

The only earthly reason he doesn’t tell her up front is that the phone call ruined his moment. Occasionally he will admit, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” but still fails to spit it out.

To be fair, the story isn’t 100 percent predictable. The most obvious revelation here would be that Beth is a war widow, and the photo Logan found belonged to her dead husband. Instead, the fallen Marine who carried her photo was her brother.

Beth is a single mother, though, who lives with her feisty grandmother (Blythe Danner) and 7-year-old son, Ben (Riley Thomas Stewart). Ben is a shy boy, but Logan helps bring him out of his shell.

This poses a threat to Beth’s ex-husband, Keith (Jay R. Ferguson), a deputy sheriff who apparently grew up idolizing Biff from the “Back to the Future” movies. Keith drives a new Dodge Charger and keeps a classic GTO in the garage. He can barely tolerate it when he sees Beth swooning for Logan, but the newcomer compounds Keith’s rage by encouraging Ben to pursue such wussy hobbies as chess and the violin.

It’s enough to make a macho dad go berserk. And you can bet it will.

From its start, the bullying ex-husband subplot is a glaringly artificial complication, added to stretch a short story into a novel. This subplot gets more exasperating when it starts to dominate the main plot. Granted, not much is going on in the main plot.

“The Lucky One” is directed by Scott Hicks, whose early career is filled with high-minded films (“Shine,” “Snow Falling on Cedars”) that don’t live up to their reputations.

In a way, this track record makes him a perfect choice to direct a Sparks adaptation (the script is credited to Will Fetters). Hicks and cinematographer Alar Kivilo imbue the film’s look with golden sunlight.

Whenever possible, they backlight Efron and Schilling to appear as if haloes envelop them.

Hicks leans heavily on montages, too. When the story stalls, he cues up a syrupy song and hits the editing bay. He delivers a “moving in” montage, a “getting to know you” montage, a “bonding with the kid” montage, a “fixing up the house” montage, etc. I was hoping for a “jerky ex-husband montage” with squealing tires and “Bad to the Bone,” but didn’t get one. Rats.

Many of these Sparks adaptations have been blessed with strong casts; the first one out of the box, “Message in a Bottle,” featured Kevin Costner and Paul Newman. The only seasoned veteran this time is Danner, and she gives the film a needed sense of fun.

Danner delivers a one-liner that saves an otherwise absurd moment where Beth gets the vapors washing dishes while watching Logan through the kitchen window.

Newcomer Schilling is a delight, bringing both energy and vulnerability to a character who ought to be a cliché in a sundress. Efron, though, is miscast.

Efron proved in “Orson Welles and Me” that he can act, but whether by his own choice or Hicks’, Efron spends much of “Lucky One” standing there and looking serene.

Late in the story, it becomes important that Beth fears Logan might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (something developed in the opening minutes, then dropped) and could become dangerous. Nothing about Efron’s demeanor suggests this is a possibility.

Channing Tatum might have made a more convincing Logan, but he already played a young veteran in another Sparks’ adaptation, “Dear John.”

Although the story is mostly predictable, “The Lucky One” features one of the oddest deaths I have seen in a motion picture, though it is more curious than dramatic.

Of course, it comes wrapped in nondenominational spirituality and tied up with platitudes worthy of a third-tier self-help guru. Even if Efron had clicked with his role, he couldn’t have improved this movie much.

• Jeffrey Westhoff writes movie reviews for the Northwest Herald. Email him at sidetracks@nwherald.com.

“The Lucky One”

Two stars

Rated PG-13 for some sexuality and violence

Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes

Who’s in it: Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling, Blythe Danner, Jay R. Ferguson

What it’s about: A Marine (Efron) in Iraq finds a woman’s photo and comes to believe she’s his guardian angel. He later locates the woman (Schilling) in Louisiana, and they fall in love. This makes Efron a target of the woman’s jealous ex-husband (Ferguson), a sheriff’s deputy.