The Vow

Director: Michael Sucsy
Starring: Rachel McAdams, Channing Tatum, Jessica Lange
Time Out rating:
Japanese title: Kimi e no Chikai

The lady doth forget too much, methinks. Not that Chicago artist Paige (Rachel McAdams) can help her loss of memory: after a snowy night out with hunky hubby Leo (Channing Tatum), their car gets rear-ended and Paige goes flying in super-slo-mo through the windshield. It's a 'moment of impact,' as Leo waxes in an intermittent, always-irritating pop-psych voiceover, and the result is that Paige wakes up with no recollection of her married life. Some brief flashbacks show us that this couple was so in love that they'd roll the car windows up when one of them farted (the insight of our romantic movies these days, I tell you). But now Paige treats Leo like a stranger in their own home. Can her heart be won... again?

Credit the appealingly paired McAdams and Tatum for making this hokum watchable. They're photographed like gods descended to earth (the postcoital embrace never looked so alluring) and have a sweetly tentative chemistry that is unfortunately overwhelmed by a number of ridiculously half-arsed story complications. Take your pick: the moustache-twirling machinations of an estranged father (Sam Neill), the ex who may still have eyes for Paige, the former friend with a shattering secret. By the time our consciousness-challenged heroine's mother (an ill-used Jessica Lange) does a paid-by-the-tear monologue about forgiveness and family, you'd like this whole demographic-pandering enterprise to be swept up and scattered by a Windy City gust.

The Vow opens nationwide on June 1