Safe Haven

You know how when someone gets about halfway through a joke and you realize you’ve heard it before, only with slightly different circumstances—and it was better the first time you heard it? Well, welcome to the world of Nicholas Sparks movies. Sparks’ novels typically plant star-crossed lovers in North Carolina, and there is often a death in the immediate past or immediate future. The best of these films is The Notebook; most of the rest aren’t worth mentioning. In Safe Haven, Alex and Katie (Josh Duhamel and Dancing With the Stars’ Julianne Hough) take their love slow at first. Katie has a reason: She’s on the run from the law and wound up in North Carolina for a fresh start. All of it is pretty humdrum, but better than a lot of Sparks offshoots. Except for the cop pursuing Katie (David Lyons); he’s one of the most one-dimensional villains in years.