A romantic comedy needs to feel genuine in order for it to really succeed. The best suck you in and make you want to fall in love with the main characters. The worst kind of sputter through the emotions and just ask you to care about what happens for the sake of. Unfortunately The Vow is the latter, a harlequin romance wannabe that takes a premise based on a true story and squanders it.
When we first meet Leo (Channing Tatum) and Paige (Rachel McAdams) they’re madly in love and leaving a theatre in the Southport neighborhood of Chicago. When a car accident leaves her in a coma with brain trauma, Leo’s only hope is for her to wake up. But when she does, unfortunately for him, part of her is missing. Specifically the part of her life where he existed in has been erased, as their marriage and their life together has been wiped from her mind. With no short term memory involving him, only a wedding band and captured memories, it’s up to Leo to help his wife rediscover the great love they once had. Throw in her ex-fiancée (Scott Speedman), whom she remembers as a fiancée proper due to the five year gap in her memory, and a family that doesn’t like Leo and what he symbolizes in her life and you have a reasonable conflict and an intriguing scenario.
Set up by narration from Leo about the moments of their life together, the film doesn’t do anything that rings true. And it’s a shame because it has one of the most genuinely intriguing setups for a romantic comedy in some time. The character conflict from Leo brings out something interesting from Channing Tatum; intrigue.
Leo is a man who genuinely loves his wife and has a hard time adapting to the fact that the woman Paige would become with him has disappeared. It’s up to him to try and find her inside of this new person who shares everything about Paige except her memories. Trying to balance out his life now with what his life used to be, and trying to figure a happy medium for it to exist in now, this is easily one of the best character setups Tatum has had in some time.
It’s also equally intriguing for Rachel McAdams. The go-to girl if Kate Hudson turns down a lead role in the genre, McAdams gets in essence two characters to play. There’s the artist Paige, the one that fell in love with Leo and sculpted, and the woman Paige used to be. They are two distinct characters and it could be relatively fascinating to see how she plays the same character in different moments of her life, especially the old version of her sped up to a reality she doesn’t know.
The problem is that outside of the setup there’s nothing really special about the film. Nothing about what transpires rings true or is even interesting enough to warrant mention. McAdams and Tatum have a solid chemistry together but the film squanders it by not doing anything with it. It feels like a collection of parts from other, better films and despite having such a remarkable premise for the genre there’s nothing to it besides it.
There’s no soul to it, mainly, and that’s a problem for a genre that demands it. The romantic comedy is a genre that’s truly the last bastion of story-telling; we know how the three act play is going to play out beforehand. It’s in how it tells that story where the film can sink or swim and in this case it sinks like a weight.
The Vow is about on par with the sort of romantic comedies coming out on Valentine’s Day annually, which is a shame because it could’ve been so much more.
Director: Michael Sucsy
Notable Cast: Rachel McAdams, Channing Tatum, Jessica Lange, Sam Neill, Jessica McNamee, Wendy Crewson, Tatiana Maslany, Scott Speedman
Writer(s): Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein, Michael Sucsy
