The Lucky One Reviews
Even taken as simple schmaltz, 'The Lucky One' lacks the romantic impact of the adaptation of Sparks's 'The Notebook' or even the Channing Tatum-starrer 'Dear John'.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
As long as Efron's shirt comes off, he could play an accountant and no one in the target audience would care.
There's not much to the movie besides handsome sets, sun-dappled photography and a plot as predictable as the verse in a Hallmark card.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
[Hicks] hits the beats - lonely woman, hunky stranger - without bothering to develop even the slightest depth.
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| Original Score: 2/5
The overheated eroticism could have at least made for a camp classic, but the film's chilling narcissism ultimately makes for a pleasureless fantasy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
I'm beginning to think writer Nicholas Sparks isn't one person at all, but a roomful of ladies doing Harlequin-romance Mad Libs.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
A sudsy romantic melodrama that in the 1950s would have been directed with lurid overkill by the likes of Douglas Sirk.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Another Nicholas Sparks novel, another cinematic brush with insulin shock.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
A lazy (in all ways) Nicholas Sparks romance that's as pretty and vacant as its hero.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Logan's opening voice-over describes how fate can throw one's life off-course, but nothing about the film that follows strays from Sparks' well-established tear-jerking formula...
The 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
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.
USA Today
Top CriticThe cliches are as thick as a vat of honey. And the love story proves just as syrupy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The Lucky One doesn't have a genuine emotion in it or a plausible reason to endure it. It's strictly for the sisters of the cult of Sparks and the men who love them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
The latest screen adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance in which fate, destiny, and sage cliches whirl together in a sugar crash of meaningful moments and tasteful eroticism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Seeing [Schilling] and Efron fumble at each other is like watching a stick of butter and a bag of flour not turn into a cake.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
How can bestselling author Nicholas Sparks, the Thomas Kinkade of the paperback novel, keep churning out sluggish melodramas that lose not one ounce of sap on the trip to the big screen?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Despite a plot hole so big it could generate its own gravity field, it's still not a bad movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Efron acquits himself reasonably well. Is he sexy enough to make credible a scene where Beth seems to have an orgasm while washing dishes and watching him lift bags of dog food? Maybe not, but, honestly, who could?
In "The Lucky One," an occasionally shirtless Zac Efron lifts heavy things, plays the piano, reads "Moby Dick," bonds with a small child and fixes a tractor. Puppies lick his face.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
...a product that's rolled off the Nicholas Sparks assembly line with every ridiculous plot contortion hard-welded into the structure.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
The sun breaks through the clouds, you smile through your tears, and your cynicism - even the tiny voice in your head crying out, "Wait, none of this makes any sense!" - is silenced by sweet music and swelling sentiment.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The seventh and latest Sparks project to hit the screen, and the sixth one likely to elicit the response "Well, it's no 'Notebook.'"
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
If you've ever liked a Nicholas Sparks movie, you're likely to enjoy this one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
The central love story is well-constructed for what it is; it offers the requisite amount of fantasy with just a miniscule dollop of realism. It's escapism for women and an adequate date flick. Or, to be more succinct, it's a Nicholas Sparks movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's no dramatic or visual scheme here, just random camera angles tossed and mixed.
The trouble with destiny is that it leaves no room for surprise; ditto this safe midseason romancer.
Like its performers, The Lucky One isn't bad, so much as achingly banal, the sort of instantly consumable and forgettable factory-produced love story that leaves you with no impression whatsoever.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
No amount of neck nuzzling or back arching can make us believe there's real heat rising between these two.
