Love Happens: Critic Reviews

An ill-conceived dramady about love and grief.

While Love Happens is the prototypical big studio weeper, it still has some impact on your funny bone and heart.

Love Happens-but not much else in this heartfelt but dull romantic dirge.

You will want to have your tissues ready for the powerful emotional punch delivered by this film. Screenwriters Camp and Thompson break the mold with a story told with sincerity and honesty.

the worst romantic comedy of the year

Love does indeed happen, though it sure takes its sweet time, in this this meandering drama.

Even Aniston cannot make the antics forced on her by this screenplay look adorable.

Yeah, love happens. So does something else. Sappy, overemphatic and cloying...[a] mountain of narrative cliches.

Pure Hollywood hokum, with plotting that's practically impossible...graceless product placement, cutesy situations, and neatly tied bows.

More truthful (equally generic) titles might include: "Death Happens," "Psychobabble Happens" or "Lazy Screenwriters Make Love Happen Even If The Leads Have No Chemistry"

Bland, corny, sophomoric, unimaginative and painfully contrived with two leads who have no charisma or chemistry together. [It's] a great cure for insomnia.

The film was a winner right up until the last ten minutes, when it preceded to punch me in the face with every cliche possible.

It's not a must-see, but with some nice performances and some scenic views of Seattle, if you wait until it comes to cable, it's pleasant enough.

Love Happens is an inorganic soap opera: It leaves you with a sudsy residue.

I'd never have expected that the movie would be saved, just a little, from being complete bullsh*t by the presence of Aaron Eckhart.

Dramedy about grief and love likely won't interest kids.

In defense of Love Happens, we can say only that it's not as hair-raising a combination of romance and grief as last year's Seven Pounds, although it's close.

Burke's hollow pop-psychspeak, lightly ridiculed at first, is wholly embraced by the film's end, if not as adamantly as the outrageous product placements for Qwest and Home Depot.

...a coma-inducing collection of unimaginative sermons, tasteless symbolism and one of the most crass uses of product placement to come down the pike in some time

A cliche-ridden, treacly drama that trivializes the bereavement process while it makes romance look easy and like a foregone conclusion.

Oh, Love Happens, does it? Thanks, movie. Thanks for the evocative and powerful title. Way to show some effort.

Although the film begins promisingly, it proves to be little more than a soap opera.

If a camera crew had simply followed Eckhart around Seattle without any directions, they could probably have come up with almost the same film.

[The director] goes for the melodramatic jugular, knocking over the pitcher of lemonade his characters have so faithfully made from their lemons, and souring the entire film.

A surprisingly thoughtful romantic drama saddled with a climactic scene so cloying and artificial that one can hardly believe it's part of the same movie. And yet, what surrounds this five-minute faux pas is really kind of great.