REVIEW: The Vow

Relationships take time. No, let me rephrase that... good relationships take time to build trust, understand each other, and ultimately, to fall in love.

Awwww, how mushy of me! But it's true. Lust cannot turn into love without that time to truly understand each other. That's why the romance genre has made enough use of the absolute pickle when someone suffers amnesia, thus erasing their memories of their loved one and thus making them "fall out of love" (if that's possible?!)

Ah, that old chestnut! Just take a look at the ol' favourite, The Notebook and the, erm, not so favourite, 50 First Dates to see some true Hollywood versions of amnesia taking away that love.

I've basically just given away the plot of The Vow in that very short opening. If you do need me to clarify, then the film follows Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum), a couple who were "made for each other", suffer a terrible car accident. When Rachel wakes up from her medically induced coma, she has absolutely no recollection of her new life that she built with Leo in the big city to follow her dreams of making it as a successful sculptor and instead thinks that she still lives in the suburbs with her parents and has never met Leo at all...

It's a simple storyline that, quite frankly, has a "been there, done that" kind of feel to it. Not only that, but the film slides so comfortably into the romance genre, that it does hardly anything to even try and challenge it.

Let's see...

Characters living in the big city where "dreams come true"? Check.

Said characters trying to live out their dreams, however unrealistic or bohemian they may seem? Check.

A family unsupportive of the relationship? Check.

Said family living out in the leafy suburbs with a ridiculously huge mansion? Check.

Younger sibling who is getting married and in a seemingly perfect relationship? Check.

It's all there really. There's no denying that The Vow is definitely a romance film. Now, I normally wouldn't have a problem with a film sticking so rigidly to the conventions of it's genre, but when the story itself is so uninspired (and arguably just plagiarised from many other films), that's when a problem starts to occur.

Where the film does succeed though is with it's characters. While Channing Tatum is pretty wooden in his role, Rachel McAdams really does go for it (when she could have so easily just done this one for the money.)

Without meaning to get too 'film school' in this review, her character-arc is so obviously defined that it makes it really hard to not sympathise with her. She is introduced as this bohemian and care-free woman who loves her husband for all his little flaws (she even winds up the window so she can smell his fart... nice!) It is once she awakens from her coma that we start to understand that she was brought up by her family as a prim and proper preppy law-school student from the suburbs... and this is who she thinks she is again.

While Tatum starts to do stupidly insane things to get his wife back to the person who he loved, it is the drama in her struggle that shines through in McAdams performance (like organising a surprise party for his wife who has forgotten who all her friends are...?!) While these struggles are subtly built throughout the majority of the film, the main tension comes at the end when McAdams learns the truth about why she left her family in the first place. While it does open up some questions (the main one being, why she was so mad at everyone in her family) it was a surprising "twist" to the pretty standard story.

So, the film seems pretty mis-matched in places. While McAdams does a pretty good job of drawing us in to her struggles of a sufferer of amnesia who is scared of who she "really" is, the basic plot and cardboard cut-out performance from Tatum really does hinder the film in some major ways.

Just please, Hollywood. No more romance films involving amnesia. Please...

** 1/2 / *****