Directed by Michael Sucsy. Starring Rachel McAdams, Channing Tatum, Sam Neill, Scott Speedman, Jessica Lange, Jessica McNamee 12A cert, gen release, 103 min
IF YOU WANT evidence that the US is a decadent society, then take note of the way mainstream Hollywood represents bohemian lifestyles.
In The Vow, poor wee Rachel McAdams has run away from her father's mansion to work as a sculptor in an allegedly funky section of north Chicago. Her supposed hovel turns out be an enormous, gorgeously distressed warehouse decorated with vintage furniture and spiky-haired friends wearing the sort of geek-chic spectacles you yearn to smash beneath intolerant heels. Channing Tatum's weird-cardigan budget – this one has three collars and dodecahedrons for buttons – could feed a family of eight for a year.
What we have here is an updating of Love Storythat manages to be even more nauseatingly lachrymose than the original. This time round it's the guy who comes from an ordinary background and the woman who was raised on caviar and grilled serf. Happily for McAdams, no cosmetically beneficial wasting disease threatens to send her towards an elegant death.
However, another implausible medical condition, equally common to low-grade melodrama, is waiting ominously round the corner. After a car accident, she wakes up with an aggressive strain of movie amnesia. Remembering nothing of her marriage to Tatum, she still thinks herself on good terms with her snooty parents and imagines that she is studying for a law degree. Pulling his avant-garde cardigan tighter about his giant shoulders, Tatum sets out to make McAdams fall in love with him all over again.
McAdams, more committed than necessary, manages to avoid total embarrassment. Everybody else seems overpowered by the galloping absurdity. Sam Neill is vacant as her dad. Playing mum, Jessica Lange wrings her hands and twists her face like a woman who’s just been told her shoes are on fire.
And Tatum? Oh dear. Having established some credentials in Step Upand Public Enemies, the poor man, clearly uncomfortable when not dancing or fighting, is reduced to squinting bleakly into an invisible sun while attempting to swallow the risible dialogue before it gains mortifying intelligibility. For the most part, he succeeds.
You can find better ways to spend Valentine’s Day.
