“Safe Haven” Might Have Started with Gimmicky Ending First

“Gimmicky Ending First”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Safe Haven is from a Nicholas Sparks novel, and for those of you out there who are familiar with his novels and the movies made from his novels, I need to say nothing more.

However, for those of you out there who aren’t familiar with them, here goes.

The movie begins with a young woman played by Julianne Hough running through the rain in Boston and getting onto a bus.

The bus makes a rest stop at a small fishing village in North Carolina, but the woman doesn’t get back onto the bus.

She gets a job as a waitress at Ivan’s Fish Shack, and she finds a place to stay, a small cabin isolated in the woods that needs quite a bit of fixing up.

One day a young woman named Jo stops by and says that she also lives in the woods, because she is rustically inclined.

Then we see a policeman back in Boston going through the police work as he tries to track the first young woman down, who is named Katie.

Meanwhile, Katie buys some yellow paint to paint her kitchen floor in the general store, where she meets Alex, a young widower with two children, who is played by Josh Duhamel.

Katie and Alex begin to develop a romantic relationship, and Katie tells him, “I was just looking for a change, and I’ve always wanted to live in a small town.”

In the meantime, you might think that the movie contains a lot of unnecessary scenes, but we also get some flashbacks that begin to explain the situation that caused Katie to run away in the rain in Boston, which point to her as having been responsible for having done something awful.

Of course, there are also scenes that are not too subtle of Katie and Alex falling in love, but she keeps whatever it was she did back in Boston a secret from him.

And then as the audience learns the secret through flashbacks and scenes of the policeman tracking Katie down, you might even begin to think that the backstory is completely gratuitous to the love story going on between Katie and Alex.

Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.

Safe Haven ends, however, as if the writer thought up a gimmicky ending first and then wrote the story second.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”