Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried star as star-crossed lovers in Dear John, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks.

Credit: supplied

MOVIE REVIEWS (Week of Feb. 5)

For showtimes click here

DEAR JOHN
Starring Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried
Directed by Lasse Hallström
Here’s a Hollywood cautionary tale: Fail to find commercial success with a sharp-witted caper drama starring Richard Gere, and you’ll find yourself trying to coax emotion out of Canning Tatum in a treacle-heavy adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook) novel. Such is the lot of director Lasse Hallström (The Hoax), who’s saddled with a film whose plot hinges on letter writing and coin collecting while employing autism, cancer, and 9/11 among its shameless bids to get the waterworks flowing.

While on leave at his South Carolina home, taciturn Special Forces officer John (G.I. Joe’s Tatum, once again playing little more than an action figure) crosses paths with wide-eyed college student Savannah (obnoxiously peppy Amanda Seyfried). After a two-week whirlwind romance (which primarily involves tickle fights and cuddling on the beach), John reluctantly ships out for his final year of duty. Alas, their reunion is scuttled when some killjoy terrorists fly a plane into the Twin Towers. Separated for years, the lovers communicate solely through insipid letters, each one read aloud by either Tatum or Seyfried and accompanied by an appropriately inane montage.

Obviously, such a premise is completely reliant on the audience’s willingness to invest itself in the central players and their relationship. Alas, you’re likely to generate more of a spark rubbing Ken and Barbie dolls together. Those seeking solace in the subplots — John deals with his autistic father (Richard Jenkins) while Savannah bonds with a family friend (Henry Thomas) — are sorely out of luck, as both storylines are poorly developed and clumsily handled. At least Dear John’s fixation with coin collecting finally culminates in the film’s biggest laugh. It’s purely unintentional but, by that point, you’ll take what you can get. ★ —Curtis Woloschuk

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE
Starring John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Directed by Pierre Morel
As the assistant to the U.S. Ambassador in Paris, James (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is living large, shacked up in swanky digs with his smoking-hot girlfriend. But what he really wants is a gig in CIA covert ops. Fate comes knocking in the form of Charlie Wax (John Travolta), a brash, foul-mouthed agent whom James has to chauffeur around town. Before you can say baguette, the mismatched duo is butting heads with Chinese triads and trying to crack a terrorist cell, turning Gay Paree into a grim charnel house.

After the surprising success of 2009’s Taken, French-born director Pierre Morel returns to the City of Light for another round of mayhem. From the outset, his movie suffers from an identity crisis, unsure whether it’s supposed to be an espionage thriller, a drama, or a buddy flick. Much like shlockmeister Uwe Boll’s disastrous oeuvre, it does, however, succeed as an unintentional comedy, with blood-spattered video-game-style massacres, choppy editing, an exaggerated score, and an unceasing parade of “dramatic” slow-motion sequences. The acting is equally amusing.

While Rhys Meyers embodies bland as the weak comic foil, Travolta — looking like a poor man’s Bruce Willis with goatee and shaved head — embraces his homicidal side, delivering his lines with a wink and a nod, and chewing through scenery like a great white at a seal buffet. The supporting cast, meanwhile, embraces its gory deaths with gusto.

Fans of cinema-gone-wrong will appreciate From Paris With Love’s appalling dialogue, ludicrous plot line, and general excess. All others had best steer clear. ★ —Greg Ursic

SAINT JOHN OF LAS VEGAS
Starring Steve Buscemi, Romany Malco
Directed by Hue Rhodes
First-time writer-director Hue Rhodes’s excessively quirky account of a gambling addict’s downward spiral proves as frustrating, pointless, and unrewarding as a losing scratch ticket.

A low-rung pencil-pusher at an insurance company, John (Steve Buscemi) has a shot at moving up the corporate ladder when he’s sent out with veteran adjuster Virgil (Romany Malco) to investigate a potentially fraudulent claim. The catch is, their case will lead them back toward Las Vegas, the city that almost spelled John’s ruin. En route, they must also contend with a stripper in a wheelchair, redneck nudists, a spontaneously combusting carnie, and a shadowy figure named Lou Cipher.

One can only imagine this all must have read uproariously on the page in order to lure the usually reliable likes of Buscemi, Peter Dinklage, and Tim Blake Nelson. Sadly, Rhodes seems to believe it’s sufficient to simply parade out a bunch of grotesques without providing them anything of consequence (or even the least bit humorous) to accomplish. Look no further than Sarah Silverman, saddled with playing a romantic interest whose sole character trait is a fixation with yellow smiley faces. Not typically a sympathetic figure, you can’t help but feel sorry for the brash comedienne as she attempts to make anything out of such a one-note creation.

Rhodes’s deficiencies as a writer are only exacerbated by his listless direction, with practically every scene done in by flat visual composition and plodding pacing. While Buscemi attempts to overcompensate for this by maniacally gesticulating and mugging, this only gives him the air of a condemned man who’s just realized that, when you roll the dice on an untested filmmaker, you’re occasionally going to come up snake eyes. ★ —Curtis Woloschuk

For showtimes click here