A Walk to Remember (January 24/02)

A Walk to Remember is easily a candidate for worst film of the year, and it’s not even February yet.

Pop princess Mandy Moore makes her starring debut as Jamie, a deeply religious young girl whose father just happens to be the town preacher. Shane West stars as Landon, a badass with an attitude (how do we know he’s a badass? He wears his headphones askew and sneers a lot). As the movie opens, Landon and his “homies” (read: badass friends) have goaded an idiotic freshman to take a belly-flop off an impossibly high platform into a lake. The kid goes unconscious and the cops show up; Landon is sentenced to appear in the school play. Though he initially scoffs his way through rehearsals, his bad-boy exterior begins to crumble as he finds himself getting closer to Jamie.

A Walk to Remember is clearly intended for undiscriminating 11-year-old girls – the sort who find Harlequin romances too complex. Like the similarly awful Here On Earth, A Walk to Remember assumes that its audience has never seen a romance picture before (or any movie, really). The film plays out exactly as you might expect, with Landon initially “too cool” to hang out with Jamie. But her blandly polite exterior stirs something in him, and he drops the bad-boy façade ridiculously fast. Gone are the leering stares and passive-aggressive put downs – the new Landon builds telescopes and fills Jamie’s porch with flowers.

The performances range from pretty bad to downright awful. In the latter category sits Mandy Moore, who apparently fancies herself a contemporary Doris Day – except without any of the charm or acting ability. She rarely falters from her one expression of angelic kindness, and when she attempts an actual emotion, she comes off worse than Madonna did in any of her movies. Moore even gets the chance to sing an entire song, and surprisingly enough, she proves to be inept at lip-synching (a skill you’d think she would’ve honed during her day job). Her co-star, Shane West, doesn’t fare nearly as badly – if only because his lackluster acting is semi-obscured by Moore’s train wreck of a performance. West appears to have based his character upon Luke Perry’s Dylan from Beverly Hills, 90210 – with a splash of Jason Priestly’s Brandon thrown in for good measure. Rounding out the cast are two veterans – Peter Coyote and Daryl Hannah – who look thoroughly embarrassed (well, Coyote does anyway. Hannah just looks weird – her dyed hair and Barbara Hershey-esque lip job have turned this previously attractive actress into a creepy cautionary tale).

A Walk to Remember might be entertaining if given the Rocky Horror Picture Show treatment – it takes itself so seriously that audience put-downs and flying toast could only make it better.