The Vow: Critic Reviews

The two stars look dewy and glossy and unexceptional, bound together less by chemistry than by the ministrations of a hard-working costume designer.

The movie's commitment to the blandest possible presentation of its central problem starts to seem perverse after a while.

Channing Tatum is terribly miscast as an arty husband who tries to help his amnesiac wife remember their blissful time together.

The Vow promises tried-and-true rom-com formula and delivers, treading in sappy, cliche-ridden turf.

It's a shame things are so black and white, because the movie has more promise - and more laughs - than trailers suggest.

It's quite watchable date-night cheese - the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.

The Vow makes the least of its concept, refusing to acknowledge that a love need not be perfect to merit holding on to.

McAdams is a beautiful blank. There's not a single moment when her character feels real, or as if she genuinely has anything at stake.

A Valentine Day's gift swaddled in sanitized Saran wrap, The Vow is a pretty package of sweets, sealed off from the corrupting air of reality.

It's pleasant enough as a date movie, but that's all.

Most of the time it plays like the movie adaptation of a Land's End catalogue, making monogamy seem essential by associating it with high-end interior design.

McAdams and Tatum aren't exactly thespian heavyweights, but even if they were, there isn't much they can do with this hokey melodrama...

The best thing in the film is McAdams, who moves through her post-amnesia scenes with a plausible mix of good humor and wariness.

The Vow is a welcome antidote to cynicism, and a bracing tonic that proves love hasn't disappeared from the film experience completely.

With its stately crane shots and plaintive score, The Vow feels as unabashedly sentimental as those melodramas, but resists the cloying impulse to manufacture tragedy for easy tears.

Sucsy works within the trappings of a typical cheesy romance but finds realism in the details and the banter.

Not even Channing Tatum's bare bum, clearly a Hail Mary pass lobbed at the ladies in the theatre, can distract from the turgidly sappy goings on in The Vow.

More than willing to comfort anyone with a fuzzy grasp on real-world romance that the pretty people will make it through somehow, with no scars too deep.

The kind of featherweight fare that is enjoyed in the moment and forgotten soon after the end credits roll.

This film, with its would-be crowd-pleasing contrivances and rote adherence to formula, offers almost no redeeming characteristics.

Earnest hokum of this nature has become increasingly rare. And for a reason.

"The Vow" serves as a series of precise if obvious moments and emotional cues we must endure en route to the inevitable reconciliation, complete with an intrusively heart-tugging score and too much explanatory voiceover from Tatum.

'The Vow' is inspired by a true and wonderful story, but that doesn't make the fictionalized version any less ridiculous.

This is a movie that leaves you wanting more. To care more, to cry more, to love more.