Safe Haven (2013)

A young woman with a mysterious past lands in Southport, North Carolina where her bond with a widower forces her to confront the dark secret that haunts her.

I expected too much of this movie. Just seeing it associated with The Notebook made me think this was the reinvented version, but it wasn't.

Of course it was a love story, not a bad one, just slowwwwwwww.  It took half the movie to get the guy and girl together even though they had chemistry from 10 minutes in.  I also didn't like that she had to bond with a widower--the fact he had two children was kind of weird and unnecessary.  The movie would have been fine without the kids, but I guess it would have made her less lovable (but only slightly).

So a quick synopsis, because one-liners from imdb are not really sufficient:

Girl is abused by husband, leaves him.  Husband is a cop and tracks her down (slowly). Meanwhile girl makes friends in a small town and decides to live there for a while.  Falls in love with widower and his family.  Husband finds her and abuses her until she finally kills him.  Girl and widower can finally be together in the end.

I don't know why it took 2 hours to explain that to me in movie form.  A lot of scenes were filler crap that had no place in the movie.  Honestly it was like a really long crime drama...like a really bad episode of Law and Order: SVU!

The ending did make the movie though.  If you do decide to watch this movie the last 10 minutes are worth the wait I promise!  I love Cobie Smulders from How I Met Your Mother but her performance in this movie was unexpectedly amazing and heartbreaking at the same time. Keeping true to Nicholas Sparks tradition, he made me bawl like the baby I am at the end of this film.

In short, if you're interested in this movie then just watch it, but if you don't have time to invest in Safe Haven then don't worry about it...you're not missing much.  This is a good movie for a rainy day or if you're stuck home alone with nothing to do.

3 stars, I wouldn't watch it again, but seriously the ending was phenomenal!