The Best Of Me is a new drama/romance film which is directed by Michael Hoffman and stars Michelle Monaghan, James Marsden, Luke Bracey, Liana Liberato and Gerald McRaney. The Best Of Me follows the story of two young high school sweethearts, who after many years of being apart from each other are reunited when both of them need to travel back to their hometown.
The Best Of Me Trailer
The Best Of Me Review
The plot of this movie is really straight forward as it focuses on two central characters which are Amanda and Dawson. We watch Amanda and Dawson meet when they are young and develop their relationship and we also see an older version of the characters where they couldn’t be further apart. The Best Of Me constantly jumps between past and present versions of Amanda and Dawson, but it’s not a confusing movie, it’s very straightforward.
The younger versions of Amanda and Dawson are played by Liana Liberato and Luke Bracey, these characters are in high school and we watch them slowly fall in love. The older versions of Amanda and Dawson are played by Michelle Monaghan who some may have seen recently in True Detective. The older Amanda has her own husband and family and the older Dawson who is played by James Marsden is on his own, he starts off the film in some sort of oil refinery accident. We as the audience are sort of made to wonder what happened between the seemingly perfect couple and we watch them go through quite a lot together. Events in the film slowly make the two older versions of Amanda and Dawson go to the same location so we can get more memories and flashbacks to their times in which they shared the best of each other.
I wasn’t really sure about this movie, it seemed like it was trying to be really good and had a lot of these moments to sort of try make you feel something from the characters or certain events that happened as we watched them grow older. But it didn’t seem to be very well executed, even though it had the right ideas. Most of the movie to me seemed really cheesy and really lame at times and a lot of the time I felt I had seen it all before or could even predict what would happen next.
While the characters get a long time to develop and we see a lot of their lives, there were certain things about them that didn’t seem authentic to me. At times things in the movie just seemed way to perfect and way to nice to be real, almost like I couldn’t really believe in the story being told to me. It just seemed way to unrealistic. I was thinking when I was watching The Best Of Me that it felt like I was watching one of those movies that are played at midday on channel 7 or 9 during the week which you haven’t heard of, but you can sort of tune in and watch and they aren’t that bad, but think about them too much and actually they are far from great, that’s what The Best Of Me is, it’s just not that great even though it tries its best to be.
Acting wise everything is alright, there was nothing here that I would think could blow anyone away, it was all fairly standard. I think though it was more to do with how everyone was presented on screen, because everything seemed so cheesy and over the top it makes it hard to believe what’s going on in the screen in front of you. The film does have its sad moments here and there but they didn’t make much of an impact on me because I either saw them coming or they just weren’t much to watch.
I didn’t feel like I enjoyed any part of the directing of this movie as it felt like a random midday movie that could be straight to TV or DVD and that’s not how I want to feel at the cinema. While I do enjoy watching drama’s, this film makes last weeks The Judge look like a cinematic masterpiece. There’s something just wrong with this movie and I think everyone will be able to see what that is when they watch it, I wasn’t bored when watching this, but I just wasn’t impressed with anything I saw in there. It also goes way over the top with all the love/romance feelings between characters and I just didn’t think it seemed like authentic romance.
I don’t really enjoy ranting about things I don’t like so much because the filmmakers probably meant well. So I’ll just say that if you want to watch this, then go ahead, but otherwise just watch it when it’s available to rent or appears on TV, you’re not missing much. You’re better off watching The Judge if you want a much better constructed drama and at least you’ll get a better cast with that one. Overall The Best Of Me is not the worst movie I have watched this year, but it is far from the best.
Comments 0