On the weekend before Valentine’s Day, I reluctantly said “I do” to the year’s first highly-anticipated romantic drama, “The Vow.” The prospect of one hundred minutes of an amnesic Rachel McAdams did not appeal to me for some mysterious reason. On top of that, I will reveal that the muscular heartthrob Channing Tatum has never been my cup of tea.
So despite the fact that I could not be less of a typical teenage girl when it came to my expectations for “The Vow,” I found myself packed in a theater along with hundreds of these very creatures.
“The Vow” quickly cut to the chase. Within minutes, the dreaded car crash scene was already out of the way, giving the audience more than an hour and a half to watch the relationship between Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum) deteriorate. I might have enjoyed Leo’s desperate struggle to make his wife remember him if their marriage had been either touching or something to which I could relate.
However, their courtship was rushed — fueled by the characters’ shared loneliness and desire to be hip and artsy. After Paige loses all memory of her relationship with Leo, she reverts back to the stereotypical rich-girl personality that she possessed before the two met. At this point, I could not decide which of Paige’s two personas was worse. Was it the brooding, vegetarian, artist version of Paige? Or perhaps it was her shallow, sorority girl persona?
To compound my dilemma, it became almost impossible to like any of the secondary characters. They became divided by whether or not their personality was compatible with new Paige or old Paige. By the end of the movie, I could not be sure if I was rooting for the couple’s love to prevail or simply for the movie to be over so that I could escape all of the annoying characters.
Although I cannot say that I enjoyed the plot of “The Vow,” I did find myself enjoying several strange phenomena. For example, almost every character had the uncanny ability to cry a single, dramatic tear. Even weirder were Rachel McAdams’s questionable hairstyles throughout the movie. At the beginning of the film, McAdams wears a strange, short wig. After the accident, her character sports a set of highlights that gives Kate Gosselin a run for her money. My friend summed up our feelings after viewing one scene in which Paige and Leo enjoy a box of chocolate truffles: “This might be the best part of the entire movie! Who stuffs entire truffles into their mouth?” At this point, we were grasping at straws in order to make sense of our decision to see the movie.
Although my low expectations were not disappointed by “The Vow,” I talked with several people who love both cheesy romantic dramas and Channing Tatum. They were not so hot about the movie either. The ending, especially the end credits, which revealed that the plot was based off of a true story, failed to leave them with the same strong feelings they experienced after similar romances like “The Notebook.”
In retrospect, I wish I had signed a pre-nuptial agreement before walking down the aisle to watch “The Vow.” That is twelve dollars and one hundred minutes of my life that I will never get back.
Molly Herbison is a first-year student at WCU. She can be reached at MH757997@wcupa.edu.