Based on true events, The Vow is a bittersweet love story of a newlywed couple and was released just in time for Valentine’s Day. It begins with Paige (Rachel McAdams) unfastening her seatbelt in an attempt at a little foreplay with her husband Leo (Channing Tatum) on their way home from a movie on a snowy night. But before Paige can start anything the pair is hit from behind by a truck, sending Paige through the windshield and leaving her in a coma. A few weeks later she wakes with no memory of her husband, her marriage or her current life.
Instead of returning home with Leo, she reverts to her former life with her stuck up, upper-class parents, whose scandalous secret is long hidden from the audience, and are too caught up in getting her back from her husband. When Paige’s ex-fiancé, whom she has no memory of splitting up with, enters her life again it leaves Leo asking one question: How do you look at the girl you love and tell yourself it’s time to walk away?
Tatum’s performance was not surprising, as he has played the heartbroken guy many times before, and he does so exceptionally well. But McAdams is the real enticement in this film. She is her same bubbly and free-spirited self on-screen and she uses that to draw in her audience. I kept cheering for Paige even when she was extremely frustrating in her withdrawal from Leo.
Paige and Leo get a second chance to experience something that some people don’t get to experience once in their life: falling in love. But there was something missing. There is a lack of emotion and little magic seemed to spark from the couple’s interactions. You could see the affection and consideration they had for each other, but could not actually feel the love. It’s obvious when people are truly in love; the way they look at each other, as if there is no one else around; touching each other like it’s the last time their bodies will be near one another again. I didn’t see that with Paige and Leo. Their love for each other didn’t come across strongly enough and it made their struggle to stay together that much harder to watch. After the accident Leo is a stranger to Paige, but how can she fall in love with him again if she is a stranger to herself?
A downfall was that The Vow came off too much like earlier romantic dramas, The Notebook and Dear John. It could just be the actors that played the main characters of Paige and Leo that made the movies seem so similar. I’m not complaining about seeing Channing Tatum’s body on the big screen though; if I woke up and he told me he was my husband, I wouldn’t question it for a second. But when I heard Leo say, “Two weeks, that’s all it took for her to fall in love with me,” I had to take my ticket stub out of my pocket to make sure it said The Vow and not Dear John. If I’m paying to see a new movie the least the writers could do was have Tatum learn a new script.
