Review by Justin Bateman
Stars Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Richard Jenkins, Henry Thomas, Braeden Reed, DJ Cotrona, Cullen Moss, Gavin McCulley,
Jose Lucena Jr, Keith Robinson, Scott Porter, Leslea Fisher
Written by Jamie Linden
Certification UK 12A | US PG-13
Runtime 102 minutes
Directed by Lasse Hallström
If Dear John was a pizza it would be a quattro formaggio. Don’t get me wrong, I am big fan of love but it’s notoriously hard to express well on-screen and I’m afraid even the Oscar-nominated director Lasse Hallström hasn’t managed it in this modern day weepie.
John Tyree (Tatum) is in the Special Forces and home on leave in Charleston, South Carolina for two weeks. In that time he meets Savannah (Seyfried) and the two fall in love, promising to stay in touch via the old-fashioned medium of letters, since he is posted in faraway places where there isn’t even any internet, heaven forfend. They exchange letters at a rate of about 40 a day but will their love survive the tyranny of distance?
Ostensibly a romantic love story, in fact the relationship between John and Savannah is largely predictable. It’s also incredibly cheesy at times, with one sequence like an ad for the postal service as we see the journey of a letter from John’s position in the field to the US Army mail sack, into the US, via the postal system and finally into Savannah’s college mailbox where she collects it, her eyes lighting up on seeing the sender’s name.
Far more interesting is the relationship between John and his father Bill (the ever-excellent Jenkins). Having brought up John on his own, Bill is painfully shy and has withdrawn into his coin collection, which was once the only shared interest between father and son. Having grown out of it, John has once again ‘lost contact’ with Bill and it’s only Savannah’s interest in him and his hobby that brings him part of the way out of his shell.
The tragedy doesn’t end there though and there are a few twists and turns aimed squarely at pulling on the heartstrings before the film reaches its conclusion. Despite his assertions that this wasn’t meant to be sentimental, Hallström has given us exactly that, a cheesy love story with plenty of heartache, tears and letter writing montages in close-up. The leads are fine and it looks fantastic at times – the veteran Swede sure knows how to frame a shot with the South Carolina coastline and surrounding countryside eminently filmic. But it's all a bit dull and unless you simply want something to make you blub, there’s nothing much new here and not a whole heap to recommend it.