The Vow – Movie Review

The Vow – Movie Review

A romantic "what if" heart-tugging teaser, The Vow addresses true love, and whether history can repeat itself if the couple involved has to start afresh as if they’d never met. That’s the test newlyweds Leo (Channing Tatum) and Paige (Rachel McAdams) confront
when a brain injury from an accident induces partial amnesia in Paige.

Suddenly the past five years of her life are a mental blank – a contrivance that just happens to leave her with no memory of leaving law school to become an artist, of leaving her parental home to live alone in Chicago and of having met and fallen in love
with Leo. For Paige, on regaining consciousness, she is resuming life from the time she was at home with her wealthy parents (Sam Neill, Jessica Lange), about to go to law school and engaged to another man.

Her parents consider her "perfectly herself again" and want her to recuperate at home, while Leo wants his soul mate Paige to try to regain her lost memory in the circumstances she was in just before the accident. Eventually, Leo has to start all over again
and try to make Paige fall in love with him as before. But is it possible if Paige is a young woman with different attitudes to the woman he initially wooed?

It’s a twist on the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, and boy-tries-to-win-girl-back story. There’s predictability to what’s likely to happen – it is inspired by a true story – but the film still manages to create some uncertainty in the outcome and sustains
interest in getting there. Except for the brief appearances of friends of Leo and Paige, and the revelation of a family secret, the story smartly keeps its focus on the couple at the heart of its tale.

Both stars have romantic drama credentials and work well together. Tatum (Dear John) proves a sympathetic, frustrated luck of a hunk, while the fetching McAdams (The Notebook, The Time Traveller’s Wife) is suitably confused as someone who knows what her
life was, but can’t remember it and struggles to re-discover the identity of who she became.

Neither too soppy nor sappy, The Vow steers its bittersweet way with earnest sincerity and without straying too much into sentimentality and maudlin mush, although it could have easily dropped Leo’s voiceover. It’s an unabashed chick flick and this year’s
Valentine’s Day date movie.

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Posted by Fahad Zafar on Feb 16 2012. Filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry