Pop singer Mandy Moore's starring debut is an affably -- or laughably, depending on one's taste -- square weepie romance that owes more to melodramas of the '50s and early '60s than it does to the cleavage-obsessed teen culture of the early millennium. (Those with more prurient teen pop interests should refer to Britney Spears' debut opus Crossroads, released within three weeks of this movie.) Based on a slim period novel by the treacly Nicholas Sparks, Walk to Remember updates the material to the present day, fills the soundtrack with Pop hits from Moore and various faith-based rockers, and presents a view of Southern, small-town adolescent life free from the nagging influences of sex, drugs, class conflict, and racism. Whether viewers find this refreshingly simple or unbearably boring depends on their age and background, of course, but at the very least, director Adam Shankman could've given his heroine some sort of life force or energy, anything to suggest that she isn't the dull, monotonous goody-goody she's rightly accused of being. Although Moore's first leading role isn't as embarrassing as, say, Mariah Carey's, she still doesn't have the acting chops to emote believably, and her timing isn't good enough to make the script's tepid zingers and lame comebacks work. But then, few actors could make this dialogue work, as evidenced by the greatly pained supporting performances of Peter Coyote and a badly dyed Daryl Hannah (this is, apparently, a town where blonde equals "bad").
