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63Efron, who wears an "All glory is fleeting" tattoo on his back and a soulful look on his face, gets to be more of a grown-up in The Lucky One than in most of what he's done before.
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63The most fortunate thing about The Lucky One is that despite a plot hole so big it could generate its own gravity field, it's still not a bad movie.
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63The Lucky One is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling.
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63The Lucky One delivers what's expected from it: a heartfelt romantic melodrama with attractive actors in the lead roles; gauzy, moody photography; a saccharine score; and all the heat that a PG-13 production can muster.
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60A through-and-through weepie that's unlikely to convert any Sparks naysayers. The darker hues of its war-based story nonetheless make the sugary excesses easier to swallow.
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Apr 20, 201260Efron's stopped-clock seriousness is more convincing on a melancholy loverboy than it is on a melancholy soldier. We can't quite sense the harrowing torment of lives lost before his eyes, but we can sense the sweet anguish of being around the woman you adore. It'll have to do.
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60The Sparks-styled romance has almost become its own movie genre - predictable, pure of heart, sentimental and never straying from the boy-meets-girl basics, or the surface, for that matter - and in that The Lucky One delivers.
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Apr 19, 201260The Lucky One aspires to but never reaches the grandly melodramatic heights of the über-Sparks adaptation "The Notebook," though a reconciliation embrace in an outdoor shower of some sort seems deliberately staged to evoke the earlier feature.
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Apr 22, 201250As long as Efron's shirt comes off, he could play an accountant and no one in the target audience would care.
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50So the cliches are as thick as a vat of honey. And the love story proves just as syrupy. But for those who lap up this sappy vision of romance, it contains all the key ingredients.
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50When it sticks to its central flirtation, the latest movie based on a Nicholas Sparks romance, The Lucky One, is blandly pleasant enough.
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50As a person who removes a woman's clothing in the half light of a Southern afternoon, Efron acquits himself reasonably well.
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50The leads' chemistry in The Lucky One is more theoretical than actual. Still, the sunsets and sunrises and sunbeams through the windowpanes fall easily on the eyes.
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50As a pretty, low-stakes bayou romance The Lucky One works well enough. When asked to carry any kind of dramatic weight, however, it collapses.
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50The Lucky One doesn't have the schlock rapture of "The Notebook" (the one Sparks adaptation that has really worked). The trouble with the movie isn't that it's too girly-swoony; it's that it tries to achieve emotion through glowy sunsets and a paint-by-numbers script.
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Apr 17, 201250At this point, Sparksian romances unfold via their own preordained formula, and measures of their merits largely hinge on how well each can bend the cookie-cutter.
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40"The Notebook" may have had us blubbing but since then Nicholas Sparks adaptions have offered thin pickings for cinemagoers. For all Efron's boyish charms, this one could be the most ordinary of the lot.
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40As with its gooey, smoochy predecessors, The Lucky One is, beneath it all, a fairy-tale romance, just one with modern trappings.
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40The biggest problem, however, comes down to chemistry. If the leads have it, a Sparks romance will work.
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40Depending on how you feel about Zac Efron, he is either a sensitive hunk or an inexpressive hunk, but definitely a hunk. Unable as I am to locate any feelings about him, I see Mr. Efron as a hunk with a problem delivering sustained dialogue in units of more than one or two sentences.
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Apr 19, 201240It's all just empty calories and little more than an excuse to watch Zac Efron play with puppies. It's nice, but for anyone who's too mature for Tiger Beat, it's not enough.
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40The emotions are flat, predictable and forced when they ought to be romantic.
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40The chickiest flick you're likely to see this season. Depending on your taste in romantic fare, you'll either find it toe-curlingly dreamy or ploddingly predictable.
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Apr 17, 201240When a novel gives you soapsuds and washboard abs to work with, what other choice does a director have but to provide the most aesthetically pleasing actors, scenery and sets to disguise the thinness of the underlying material.
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40Question: What's the only thing worse than doing an unfaithful film adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel? Answer: Doing a completely faithful one.
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38Another Nicholas Sparks novel, another cinematic brush with insulin shock.
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38Director Scott Hicks lavishes good taste and sunsets on a story that - devoid of genuine tension, conflict or combustible chemistry between its two stars - just prettily sits there.
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38Seeing her (Schilling) and Efron fumble at each other is like watching a stick of butter and a bag of flour not turn into a cake.
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30If realism is what you're after, you'll do better at "The Three Stooges." The Lucky One is where you will find death, redemption and kisses in the rain.
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Apr 17, 201230No amount of neck nuzzling or back arching can make us believe there's real heat rising between these two. Onscreen chemistry between actors is a mysterious thing - 100 years into cinema, it remains the one story element that Hollywood can't fake.
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30Embalming the simple and simplistic yarn in an amber glow that is all but suffocating and banishing from it any traces of humor and spontaneity, director Scott Hicks serves up this treacly tale with absolutely no trace of self-consciousness about the material's cliches or simple-mindedness.
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25Supposedly he's suffered, supposedly there are demons lurking within, but guess what: This is a movie. If we can't see it, it's not there.
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Apr 20, 201225I'm beginning to think writer Nicholas Sparks isn't one person at all, but a roomful of ladies doing Harlequin-romance Mad Libs. Occasionally they'll hit a winning combination, as in the Sparks novel "The Notebook." More often, you get eye-rollers like "The Lucky One."
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25Is it the worst of the seven screen Sparks so far? Nope. My vote still goes to 2009's "The Last Song" with Miley Cyrus mothering those unhatched turtle eggs. But it's still pretty damn insufferable.
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25Move along, guys. Nothing to see in The Lucky One, unless you're in the doghouse at home and need to make nice.