A year after falling into a coma due to injuries he suffered at a rodeo, Luke Collins tries to get back into competing despite the great risks that implies. During a show, he meets Sophia Danko, an art student: they fall deeply in love. Then Luke saves an old man who’s been in a car accident in a heavy rainstorm. As she visits the man in the hospital, Sophia gets to know this WWII veteran, who tells her about his great love: his deceased wife. A story that seems to echo Sophia’s relationship with Luke, who refuses to abandon his passion for the rodeo when she gets a chance to follow hers to New York…

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Movies adapted from Nicholas Sparks novels are like an endless supply of cotton candy: since the phenomenal success of 2004’s The Notebook, starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, Sparks has become an industry for lovers of syrupy, sunny, clichéd romance, with ten movies already made – almost one every year, including last year’s The Best of Me with James Mardsen and Michelle Monaghan, and one more in the pipeline. It’s no surprise then that George Tillman Jr.’s edition offers an overly simplistic pile of mush, and a seemingly endless one at that: it clocks in at more than two hours. Co-starring with Britt Robertson, the discovery of Tomorrowland, is Scott Eastwood, who is poised for a typical Hollywood career and is the perfect embodiment of this franchise: despite his hunky broad shoulders, you just want to slap him back to reality, especially when a country song lathers up a scene so stereotypical that you end up being stunned by its mediocrity.