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Reviews Counted:94
Fresh:17
Rotten:77
Average Rating:3.8/10
Consensus: Love Happens is a dull, chemistry-free affair that under-utilizes its appealing leads.
Genre: Dramas
US Box Office: $22,927,390
Synopsis: Aaron Eckhart and Jennifer Aniston star in the romantic drama Love Happens. When a self-help author arrives in Seattle to teach a sold-out seminar, he unexpectedly meets the one person who might... [More]
Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Jennifer Aniston, Dan Fogler, Judy Greer
Director: Brandon Camp
Hiring irritating actors Judy Greer and Dan Fogler to play buddy roles in Happens is a terrific way to state to the audience that filmmakers have little to no imagination, looking to the routine and the tiresome to squeak by
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.
A limp romantic drama that occasionally lifts its drowsy head to attempt a wan smile, a picture that starts out being harmlessly dull and ends, somehow, in a place that feels insultingly manipulative.
Love never happens in this movie, but at least there's some liking here and there.
This romantic-comedy is the kind of cloying, saccharine-saturated date movie that only the most deluded of fools in love would enjoy.
Despite its two appealing leads, Love Happens is, as the kids say, not happening.
Some may wonder why Jennifer Aniston keeps taking projects about single women unlucky in love. But the bigger question in Love Happens is why, with her pick of scripts, she chose one so utterly uninspired.
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.
Until it erupts in tears, Love Happens dawdles along uncertainly as though debating exactly how to season its morose story with enough attempted witticisms to keep the audience from dozing off.
Top CriticBland, corny, sophomoric, unimaginative and painfully contrived with two leads who have no charisma or chemistry together. [It's] a great cure for insomnia.
I think this country really needs movies like this. People are so freaked out about death of natural causes that they protest against health care. Imagine if they ever had to deal with a tragic death.
Parental Content Review
[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.
Oh, Love Happens, does it? Thanks, movie. Thanks for the evocative and powerful title. Way to show some effort.
Comes so close to defying formula and expectations only to conform to them.
...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
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 parrot has the movie's most intelligent dialogue.
Excise the love story, and there's a pretty good movie buried within Love Happens struggling to get out, mostly to little avail.
Top Critic
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