The Lucky One

Writer Nicholas Sparks is best known for one of the most spoken about romantic movies of all time – The Notebook.  Dig deeper and you will find that the man has given you 3 block busters other than The Notebook.  All of them are full-fledged romances.  Nights in Rodanthe (2008), Message in a Bottle (1999) and Walk to Remember (2002).

The Lucky One deals with a slightly different subject of love after war.  But the fundamental concept of a romance doesn’t change.  Much like Sparks’ previous works, it is a romance set to the backdrop of complex human emotion centered around some incident from the past.

Logan (Zac Effron) is a marine (no I am not obsessed with war stories today just so happened that I saw 2 of them recently and wrote about them on the same day) who is serving in Iraq.  After a full night of fighting, he walks out exhausted.  Something shining about 15’ away catches his eye and he walks across to investigate.

It is a photograph of someone with the words “Keep Safe” written on it.  As he turns around, his entire troop is killed thanks to a land mine exactly where he was seated a few seconds back.  Logan is of course shaken but keeps the photograph as a sign of good luck.  He survives a few other scares as well after he gets the photograph.

On his return he decides to look up the girl in the picture.  Using a few cues from the picture, he zeroes in on Louisiana and walks from Colorado – nearly 1200 miles – with his trusted dog !!! Of course it takes him a while to get there.  But he finds Beth (Taylor Schilling) who stays with her grandmother (Blythe Danner) and manages a kennel.

I am not sure if it is me growing older and therefore able to comprehend complex situations like the one portrayed in The Lucky One or it is just that directors like Scott Hicks and writers like Sparks have mastered the fine art of narrating complex stories.  What would you do if you were Logan and met Beth? How would you react? Would anything you do be right or wrong or good or bad or ugly?

There may really be no right or wrong answer to the question.  What if the situation gets further complicated (and I may be giving out a spoiler now) if you figure out that picture belonged to someone who died right in front of you, the day you found the picture? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions but I can sure commend Sparks and Hicks for having the courage to narrate a complex story like this one.

The performances are all solid.  People don’t really look at Zac Efron as a talented actor but I for one believe that he has a lot of potential and just needs the right director and right break to push him through.  Most of the support cast does a fine job as well.  The movie is definitely a good watch and is playing of late on HBO Hits.  Catch up with it when you can.  6 on 10.

Watch the trailer on http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi5283353/?ref_=tt_ov_vi