Movie review of The Vow - Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams look great together but THE VOW dissolves into an ordinary romance.
Few movie couples look as fantastic as Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams in The Vow. It doesn't matter what they do. They can strip to their underwear and jump into frigid Lake Michigan or walk out of Chicago's Music Box Theatre bundled up in thick winter coats. Tatum, with his chiseled, superhero jaw and wide shoulders and McAdams, with her bedroom eyes and warm smile, send out sparks even when standing nose-to-nose reciting the inane dialogue of director Michael Sucsy's memory loss romance. It's a good thing Tatum and McAdams are such a great looking couple because The Vow would crumble apart with another pair of leads.
The long-ago master of movie melodrama Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows) would love The Vow and its premise of a wife losing all memory of her marriage and husband. He definitely would have made a better movie out of it. Instead, we have Sucsy and a team of writers (Stuart Sender, Marc Silverstein, Anny Kohn and Jason Katims) delivering by-the-dots soap opera filed with greeting card sound bytes.
After a car accident with a Chicago snowplow, loving wife Paige (McAdams) wakes from a coma with no memory of her husband Leo (Channing Tatum) or their life together. Leo works hard trying to get Paige to remember their wonderful times together but Paige's affluent family seizes the opportunity to push Leo to the side and bring their daughter back home.
Sucsy's career as a commercial director and a production assistant on various big-budget movies like The Siege, Deep Impact and Jungle 2 Jungle pays off with The Vow looking great from its postcard Chicago locations like Millennium Park and The Art Institute to the cool home Paige and Leo share.
Still, average storytelling prevents Sucsy from matching the success of his previous feature, the HBO original film Grey Gardens starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and their lives together in their crumbling Long Island estate known as Grey Gardens.
The Vow is dramatically threadbare by comparison. Luckily, The Vow's cast outweighs its script and helps overcome some of its predictable moments.
Tatum is something of an expert on young romance after working with Amanda Seyfried on the adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' Dear John and he's earnest as the young husband trying to re-start his wife's memory by reliving their old habits.
McAdams is pretty and likable enough as the one-time sculptor who has forgotten how to sculpt in addition to why she left her affluent Lake Forest lifestyle to marry Leo.
Granted, Tatum is the generous hero of the story but it's to McAdams' credit that you also cheer for Paige to regain her memory.
It's worth noting that the romance at the front of the movie recounting how Paige and Leo meet is bright, bouncy and enjoyable to watch with a guerilla wedding inside the Art Institute of Chicago and warm kisses standing underneath Anish Kapoor's steel sculpture Cloud Gate in Millennium Park.
Everything goes downhill in The Vow after the crash and the memory loss melodrama takes over. It makes one wish Sucsy would have been content to make a more simple love story free of the exaggerated melodrama of amnesia. You know that Tatum and McAdams are good enough to make a slice-of-life romance shine. They make the syrupy excess of The Vow work out in the end.
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Cast: Rachel McAdams, Channing Tatum, Jessica Lange, Sam Neill, Scott Speedman
Screenwriter: Jason Katims, Anny Kohn, Marc Silverstein, Stuart Sender
Director: Michael Sucsy
Cinematographer: Rogier Stoffers
Music: Rachel Portman
Producers: Spyglass Entertainment, Screen Gems
Running Time: 104 minutes
Rating: Rated PG-13
Release Date: February 10, 2012