Former unfaithful Diane Lane humbly reaches out to a now older, but still job dedicated Richard Gere, in order to piece together yet another marshmellowey cinematic product. This is their third movie together, as they were also paired-up in "Cotton Club," when Diane was merely a high school girl and Gere was already a sex-symbol, and another steamy silver screen romance, 2002's "Unfaithful."

Based on the 2002 novel, by the irrefutable provider of Hallmark extended prose, Nicholas Sparks, this latest try seems to be not quite as convincing as his earlier contraptions such as "A Walk to Remember” and "The Notebook.”

This movie adaptation lacks precisely what it intends to shove down our throats: real emotion. The pumping of heartache and continuous serving of over the top romance sketches a painfully long soap episode. It is almost amazing how two people who pulled off quite a realistic exposition of tension and complicity overall in previous features manage to collapse into a series of fake and honestly, quite scary looking french kisses and such other cheap onscreen tricks.

Plunging from one cliche into another, the story follows Diane’s character, Adrienne Willis as a forty something mother of two demanding children trying to get away for a while in order to decide if she should part ways with her husband (Christopher Meloni). She meets Gere’s character, Dr. Paul Flanner, in a remote inn by the seaside, in Rodanthe, North Carolina. As a hurricane is on its way in the sky, another storm is growing between the two who fall into each other's arms.

Despite its tries to make the ridiculous look natural, this feature actually succeeds in tracing out as clearly as possible all of its highlights as pranks. The intent was to have nature’s forces unleashing, such as a herd of wild horses and an imminent storm in an outline of picturesque locations. The result is a clean cut commercial, standard lines and predictable outcome, packed visual interpretation of a book that is probably capable of sending out more intimacy on its own.

“When you add this chemistry to a director who’s really trying to pull out full performances, you get the feeling like this is a film you haven’t seen before,” writer Sparks says in an interview, but, sadly and ironically, it seems like all the movies based on his novels look like movies you've seen before. You just get that weird feeling in your gut that you can accurately predict what is going to happen right from the get-go.

Sparks also describes "Rodanthe" as “something like ‘Casablanca’ from the 1940s,” which is almost a blasphemy to the real movie connoisseurs.

There is no doubt that for most of us moviegoers, this one will somehow turn into a guilty pleasure, and not for its ability to connect us emotionally to its strongly built characters, or to transcend us into its solid plot as if we might acknowledge its elements as part of everyday life, but because it’s always so relaxing to clear your mind, completely if possible, for 90 minutes while watching non relevant, neutral, nonthreatening or slightly challenging captions.