Word: john
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...start with John Travolta, who plays Charlie Wax, a special operations agent for an unnamed but extremely bloodthirsty undercover American agency. To inhabit this role, he seems to have stolen Bruce Willis's bald head, along with the goatee Willis sports when he needs to look super tough and mature. This gleaming-headed Wax man has been sent to Paris to bust a drug ring and a terrorist cell. As a bonus, he will give machismo lessons to James (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a wonky polyglot who works as an aide to the U.S. Ambassador but longs to be Jason Bourne...
...Dear John is the fifth of Nicholas Sparks' books to be turned into a movie, which means that even if you haven't read a word of his novels, if you are a regular moviegoer you know what to expect. A wistful love story, tender feelings recorded in letters or notebooks and read aloud and then, just as you're wondering what kind of a gown the prospective bride or promgoer will pick out, someone vital to the story will bonk his head, fall off a boat...
...When Dear John starts, Channing Tatum looks like the likely Ali since he's flat on his back in a soldier's uniform, his blood seeping into a mud puddle. Tatum is John Tyree, a special-forces soldier madly in love with chaste, do-gooder college student Savannah (Amanda Seyfried), whom he met during a two-week leave in the spring of 2001. We go to flashbacks, and as John enfolds Savannah in his big, beautiful arms, with Sept. 11 hovering like a hurricane over the South Carolina beaches, you take bets on whether that mud puddle was in Afghanistan...
...there is something emotionally exhausted about Dear John. The cruel twist of fate is constructed out of nothing, laboriously maneuvered into place and then just left there, an illogical mess dampening all romance. This isn't a love story, it's a misery story that drags on, not to a dramatic conclusion but a tepid moment. Hallstrom and screenwriter Jamie Linden want to be true to Sparks' original sadistic ending, but they also want to leave the happiness door ever so slightly ajar. The result is a sense of "Huh? That's it?" (See the best movies of the decade...
...they could just tickle each other. Sparks is generally stingy with the carnal pleasures, and in Dear John we're to be diverted by matters of great societal significance. Savannah is interested in special education, in part because her neighbor at the beach, the appealingly humble Tim (Henry Thomas), has an autistic child and John has a slightly autistic father (it was Asperger's in the book). In both cases, the bad wives have fled, scared off by the autism, presumably. Richard Jenkins plays John's dad, and though the role doesn't require him to do much more than...