Directed by: Michael Sucsy
Starring: Channing Tatum, Rachel McAdams, Sam Neill, Jessica Lange, Scott Speedman
The Vow is about a perfectly happy couple in love and married for four years. One snowy night, they stop at a stop sign for a kiss and are rearended by a snow plow. Paige (McAdams) goes flying through the windshield and wakes up in the hospital with no memory of her husband Leo (Tatum). In fact, her memory stopped up to the point in which she was engaged to a WASP named Jeremy and she was a suburban WASP herself. This naturally hurts Leo and puts the couple on a awkward road in which she goes home with a guy she can't remember.
This sounds like a setup for a moving drama in which Paige learns to fall in love with Leo all over again, but The Vow doesn't seem to ever get started. I couldn't muster enough energy to care. Maybe because somehow Paige seemed curiously more of an unsympathetic character after the accident. The subplot involving Paige's estranged parents turned the movie into a soap opera and things are not resolved via any emotional breakthrough or truth, but on a plot turn.
I think The Vow didn't work because maybe there is only so much of an emotional arc the story can take. If Paige suddenly bumps her head again and remembers things, then it would be ludicrous. The Vow as constructed just kinds of mozies along and things all kind of fall into place neatly with little fuss. The movie is "inspired by true events", meaning based on a true story. How much of The Vow is based on the truth is not known. But even though the movie has fine performances, it needs a lot of work on the "inspired" part.
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