The Vow is mostly a wasted premise, turning an interesting idea into a cliché driven nightmare. The story sucks all the life out of the ideas by shredding the characters to new levels of thinness and choosing two leads who play best when they’re not supposed to be together so as to root for the break-up that won’t happen. If the vow is “Give the audience EXACTLY what they want with no surprises,” then The Vow does not have reality or honesty on its mind, or maybe it forgot like the lead character.
Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum) are your Sparksian leads, cute and zero chemistry. After getting rear ended in their car, Paige is left without her memory of her relationship with Leo. This is great for her parents (Sam Neill and Jessica Lange), who don’t like Leo because they blame him for their estrangement from their daughter. Complicating things further, Paige’s memory is left where she thinks she is still engaged to her old flame (Scott Speedman), who, coincidentally, is still friends with the family.
The premise is ripe with interesting questions, among them the relationship between time and falling in love. Unfortunately, anytime the Vow gets close to driving toward an answer to a hard question, it veers right back into its inevitable ending. While this can be fine if these questions are peripherally involved in the story, The Vow’s central relationship involves memory loss of said relationship. The lack of big picture thinking by the screenplay adds a level of disappointment to the Vow that it can never recover from.
Adding to the blandness of the screenplay is the poorly written/acted characters and plot premises. Sam Neill is relegated to playing one of the all time jerks in cinema. He has no redeeming qualities, and he deliberately takes advantage of every woman because that is his only quality. It makes Rachel McAdams and Jessica Lange look like fools to the point that you question their level of intelligence (I laughed aloud when I found out Paige was admitted to law school). Leo is a nicely devoted husband which is fine, but Channing Tatum has more chemistry with his assistant at work than with Rachel McAdams. McAdams does the confusion stuff well, but is spinning her wheels as Paige otherwise.
Nicholas Sparks would be proud of the Vow; in fact, he probably envies the fact that he didn’t write this. However, he should be happy that he wrote a story that has no basis in reality, no chemistry between the leads, and no reason to pay for the movie in the theater. Next time Rachel McAdams decides to take a vow, she should do more acting than she did in The Vow.