Love Happens: Critic Reviews

Other stuff happens too, all of it strained and dull.

Until it erupts in tears, Love Happens dawdles along uncertainly as though debating exactly how to season its morose story with enough attempted witticisms to keep the audience from dozing off.

How can we, as a species, tolerate Jennifer Aniston with her blurry expression of emotional bravery?

The film has an uneven tone, unsure whether to mock [Eckhart's] rudimentary words of wisdom or play up his good intentions.

Not that the grieving process shouldn't be addressed in a movie, but this one feels increasingly cooked up.

Some may wonder why Jennifer Aniston keeps taking projects about single women unlucky in love. But the bigger question in Love Happens is why, with her pick of scripts, she chose one so utterly uninspired.

There are no sparks, not the slightest sign of chemistry, between Eckhart and Aniston. They might be Hansel and Gretel wandering endlessly through tame thickets of feeling.

Love happens. Doesn't it, though? So do other, less pleasant fragrances. This much is clear in the well-acted fraud co-written and directed, woozily, by first-time feature filmmaker Brandon Camp.

Despite its two appealing leads, Love Happens is, as the kids say, not happening.

A harmless time-waster that could have been more.

The film is part romance, part drama, part Seattle travelogue, with Washington emerging as the only true winner. Along with the benefactors of the movie's copious product placements, that is.

Because there's no mystery, no chemistry and paper-thin characters, the movie coasts by on the charms of its two stars. And while Eckhart and Aniston are mighty appealing, they need to be given something more with which to work.

Excise the love story, and there's a pretty good movie buried within Love Happens struggling to get out, mostly to little avail.

Love Happens is a weepie about the grieving process, mainly my own. Two hours of my life have been brutally stolen from me, and I need closure.

Love Happens is a comedy in mourning, a romance so sad that even Jennifer Aniston at her most engaging can't save it.

This romantic-comedy is the kind of cloying, saccharine-saturated date movie that only the most deluded of fools in love would enjoy.

Aaron Eckhart is commanding as a deeply flawed man in Brandon Camp's compelling dramedy, 'Love Happens'

Hang in there Jen. You can do better.

A limp romantic drama that occasionally lifts its drowsy head to attempt a wan smile, a picture that starts out being harmlessly dull and ends, somehow, in a place that feels insultingly manipulative.

Is this a movie or a feature-length advertisement for Qwest? We're not just talking one product placement; this brand name is nearly omnipresent.

The title is a good indication of this movie's blandness and predictability.

Love supposedly happens in Love Happens. We'll have to take their word for it.

Love never happens in this movie, but at least there's some liking here and there.

That this superficial romance between a successful self-help author and a nurturing florist is also a film about overcoming the tragedy of losing a loved one only makes its cliched insipidity that much more irksome.