If you're after a high-quality weepie, this superbly crafted romantic melodrama from director Scott Hicks (Shine; The Boys Are Back) and novelist Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook; Dear John) will drain your tear ducts.
- Jim Schembri, 3AW, June 30, 2012
A tsunami of syrup and a Niagara of nonsense here in this mind-blowingly ridiculous romdram...
- Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK], May 03, 2012
[Efron] sells it almost single-handedly through sheer force of scrumminess.
- Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph, May 03, 2012
Mindless, pretty twaddle just made bearable by an enthusiastic cast (Efron in particular is strangely sympathetic) and an absolutely gorgeous setting.
- , Film4, May 02, 2012
Even taken as simple schmaltz, 'The Lucky One' lacks the romantic impact of the adaptation of Sparks's 'The Notebook' or even the Channing Tatum-starrer 'Dear John'.
- Anna Smith, Time Out, May 01, 2012
The Notebook may have had us blubbing but since then Nicholas Sparks adaptions have offered thin pickings for cinemagoers. For all Efron's boyish charms, this one could be the most ordinary of the lot.
- Helen OHara, Empire Magazine, April 29, 2012
As long as Efron's shirt comes off, he could play an accountant and no one in the target audience would care.
- Tal Rosenberg, Chicago Reader, April 20, 2012
Well-acted schmaltz with some gaping plot holes.
- Richard Roeper, Richard Roeper.com, April 20, 2012
There's not much to the movie besides handsome sets, sun-dappled photography and a plot as predictable as the verse in a Hallmark card.
- Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger, April 20, 2012
[Hicks] hits the beats - lonely woman, hunky stranger - without bothering to develop even the slightest depth.
- Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News, April 20, 2012
The overheated eroticism could have at least made for a camp classic, but the film's chilling narcissism ultimately makes for a pleasureless fantasy.
- Rafer Guzman, Newsday, April 20, 2012
I'm beginning to think writer Nicholas Sparks isn't one person at all, but a roomful of ladies doing Harlequin-romance Mad Libs.
- Sara Stewart, New York Post, April 20, 2012
A sudsy romantic melodrama that in the 1950s would have been directed with lurid overkill by the likes of Douglas Sirk.
- Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, April 20, 2012
Another Nicholas Sparks novel, another cinematic brush with insulin shock.
- Rick Groen, Globe and Mail, April 20, 2012
A lazy (in all ways) Nicholas Sparks romance that's as pretty and vacant as its hero.
- Amy Biancolli, San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 2012
Logan's opening voice-over describes how fate can throw one's life off-course, but nothing about the film that follows strays from Sparks' well-established tear-jerking formula...
- William Goss, Film.com, April 20, 2012
The Sparks-styled romance has almost become its own movie genre - predictable, pure of heart, sentimental and never straying from the boy-meets-girl basics, or the surface, for that matter - and in that "The Lucky One" delivers.
- Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times, April 19, 2012
Unable as I am to locate any feelings about him, I see Mr. Efron as a hunk with a problem delivering sustained dialogue in units of more than one or two sentences.
- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2012
Falling victim to his source material, Hicks fails to invest it with any sort of edge, rendering the cinematic version as mawkish and saccharine as Sparks' bloated prose.
- Cara Nash, FILMINK (Australia), October 24, 2012
Romance isn't dead, but films like this are giving it a bad name.
- Jessica Lambert, Little White Lies, May 02, 2012
