The Best of Me

The Best of Me turns into a half-baked dramatic thriller, with violent confrontations, gunfights, plenty of nasty characters and one big scary action scene.

There's something heavy-handed, even for Sparks, in the telling of the couple's story, particularly when it comes to Dawson's family: they are leering, brutal embodiments of evil who function as handy plot devices.

The Best Of Me, like all Sparks' work, would rather kill his characters and leave a beautiful corpse than have them continue a real, scarred relationship.

Welcome the latest Nicholas Sparks adaptation: always the same, always a bit different (but mostly the same).

You can sneer, but I don't care - the heart wants what it will, and my heart wants Sparks. So there.

"The Best of Me" will likely play well with its intended audience, who know to bring a travel-size pack of tissues to the theater. But thanks to its ending, this doesn't rank among the better Nicholas Sparks adaptations, like "The Notebook."

Sparks' devoted following knows what it wants, and The Best of Me does not relent until it has delivered every last longing look, lovelorn lunge and lachrymose loss of luck.

I actually kind of enjoyed it.

It's achieving exactly what it set out to accomplish... but also it's very bad.

The waterworks will flow with The Best of Me. The best Nicholas Sparks adaptation to date.