Have you ever read an amazing book, and upon finishing, wished you could experience it again for the first time? I know I feel this way all the time. So when Leo (Channing Tatum) compared that situation to his current situation with wife Paige (Rachel McAdams) midway through "The Vow," I breathed an inward sigh of relief; perhaps there's still hope for this movie after all!

The situation they find themselves in is indeed a tricky one. After going through a car crash which lands Paige in a coma, Paige wakes up with no recollection of the past five years -- meaning she has no memory of her current life, and worst of all, no memory of her husband, Leo. Conveniently for the film's melodramatic purposes, Paige wakes up an entirely different person, a person she's long grown out of; the "new" Paige doesn't remember her life as a vegetarian sculptor who dropped out of law school and estranged herself from her family; she remembers herself as the preppy, Stepford wife-esque law student who's engaged to her now ex, Jeremy (Scott Speedman).

So, upon realizing that there's a chance that Paige will never regain her memory, Leo proposes that they start dating, and points out the one positive in a truly sucky situation: that she can experience them falling in love all over again, as if for the first time.

Despite the contrived plot, the romantic in me found myself somewhat swept away by such a grand notion; who wouldn't want to relive the honeymoon period of a relationship all over again? I could have forgiven the film all its trashy chick-flick cliche's (the voice-overs, the slow motion shots, flashbacks, cheap wigs to show the passage of time) if it had gotten this one aspect right.


To my dismay, the majority of the movie is instead littered with extraneous subplots that do nothing but take away from the film's overall message. The most eye-roll inducing comes in the form of Paige's despicable parents (Jessica Lange and Sam Neill), who embrace and encourage her memory loss as a way to force Paige back on the "respectable" and "secure" life-track they've mapped out for her.

McAdams' Paige, who often looks doe-eyed and confused, is just as much of an anomaly of a character as her parents. Instead of trying to piece together her current life, she acts standoffish and uninterested toward Leo -- no mind to the fact that he loves her unconditionally, looks like Channing Tatum, and is her husband.

By merging into soap opera territory, "The Vow" loses a lot of the romantic earnestness it should have had. I relished the date scene, as well as some of the more lighthearted scenes, such as Paige gasping and shielding her eyes after Leo walks into the room naked. He responds to this by saying, "Come on, it's not like you haven't seen it before."

Those words could apply to the film just as well.

Rating: C