"Stories are as unique as the people who tell them, and the best stories are those in which the ending is a surprise."
That's the first line of Nicholas Sparks' romance novel "The Choice" — and it reads like a description of the stories he fails to write. By now, Sparks' books are neither unique nor surprising. They're all love stories, usually involving death or some kind of tragedy. And most of them seem to revolve around a rebellious guy falling for a Type A girl.
The dude in "The Choice" is Travis (Benjamin Walker) — a good ole boy who works with his daddy at a vet clinic in a small town off the coast of North Carolina. When he's not nursing puppies back to health, his life is about beer, boats and buds. He's a bachelor, you see. Wild horses couldn't drag him into a serious relationship. Of course, that changes when a diligent medical student named Gabby (Teresa Palmer) moves next door.
What follows is a silly yet somewhat engaging romance drama. This kind of film is like junk food. You know it's bad, but you still find yourself savoring every disgustingly sweet moment.
Like pretty much every man in the Sparks genre, Travis is a tiger waiting to be tamed. And he eats up every moment in which Gabby tries to wrangle him. "You bother me," he says, which is obviously code for "I love you."
Walker seems to be doing some kind of Matthew McConaughey impression as Travis, and Palmer is practically Monica from "Friends." But in the end, they both deliver surprisingly earnest, entertaining performances.
Oh, right, Gabby is involved with another man — a hunky doctor (Tom Welling, the guy who played Clark Kent in "Smallville"). Naturally she has to decide between the two heartthrobs at some point. But that is not the key decision to which the title refers. The real choice is spurred by a tragedy that comes out of nowhere. Despite being the titular conflict, this subplot feels oddly contrived, and it never quite leaves us truly fearing for the characters.
The "harrowing" last act of "The Choice" illustrates that life is fragile, love requires faith, blah, blah, blah. These are tender, thoughtful themes, but they ring false in the midst of the film's extremely romantic world. "The Choice" tries to hit you with hard truth, but it does so while surrounding you with a softly lit, sumptuous setting. In other words, this movie uses too many spoons of sugar to make the medicine go down.
Although it reaches for truthful drama, "The Choice" is ultimately a fantasy. And we all need a dose of romantic fantasy once in a while. This is the kind of film that frequently makes you stick your tongue out and roll your eyes. It's a candy bar of a movie, a fun flick to see on a date. Just don't expect the rest of your own romance to play out as it does on screen in this one.