“Not enough pretty people kissing,” was a lady friend’s verdict on “Mad Max: Fury Road.” As for “The Choice,” it’s pretty much all pretty people kissing. And flirting. And smiling. And making weak attempts at banter. I was too bored to hate the movie. Besides, who hates a stuffed animal? If it actually said something intelligent or surprising, you’d be alarmed, not pleased.
The pretty people are pretty enough: Benjamin Walker and Teresa Palmer are “feuding” neighbors — he a party boy who plays exceptionally bland music at full volume on quiet summer nights by the water, she a frazzled med student who soon ditches her spectacles for a bikini top.
This latest adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance novel is meant to be an opposites-attract saga, but these two are about as opposite as a cheerleader and a quarterback. Even when she initially comes over to scold him for his adorable dog getting her adorable dog pregnant, she seems like she’s ready to jump into his lap. Yet the movie spends more than an hour developing their relationship. Each has a significant other, or rather a completely insignificant one; neither mentions the absent third and fourth parties for long stretches of time and, indeed, the principals themselves seem to forget that each of them is already taken.
Where’s the conflict? When the guy you want says things like “I love you, I love you, I’ll say it a million times, I love you,” etc., things are going a bit too smoothly even for a romance, and Walker’s Travis is the cinematic equivalent of a poster of a buff, bare-chested guy wearing a fireman’s helmet and cradling a baby. He’s not a character, he’s more a checklist of female fantasy needs — so kind that the worst thing he ever does is turn up late for a date because he’s busy healing a gravely ill kitty.
Still, Walker makes for a passable next-gen Matthew McConaughey, whereas Palmer does much gaping and tossing her hair and can’t seem to utter a sentence without beaming. She is trying too hard, not that it matters: She was hired to be pretty. Mission accomplished.
Even when things take a turn, the movie doesn’t become more complicated or interesting; we simply start down an equally predictable new track.
Yet isn’t cliché the point? “The Choice” isn’t trying to be interesting. Watching it is like being stuck on a bus while the couple in front of you has an urgent argument about whether Hootie and the Blowfish or the Spin Doctors were the greatest rock band ever.