Broken Vows begins with Tara (Jaimie Alexander) in New Orleans with her friends. She hits it off with bartender Patrick (Wes Bentley), and in spite of some personal reservations, she ends up sleeping with him. The morning after, Patrick reveals himself to be pretty creepy, and Tara gets out of there real quick. It turns out that Tara is about to get married to Michael (Cam Gigandet), and she's hoping to just get back to that as if nothing happened. But Tara accidentally left her phone with Patrick in the rush to leave, and he suddenly shows up at her home. When she rejects him, he starts trying to ruin everything for her.
At which point, a sane, rational person might go to the police and report a break-in. Or perhaps, one would get a restraining order against this creepy person who would easily qualify as a stalker. But that is not what happens in this film. Even when the characters learn later on that Patrick has a history of this kind d of behavior, and might in fact be dangerous, Tara does nothing to really resolve her situation. The film already suffers from the handicap of telling a kind of story that long fell out of fashion. But then, it doesn't even do it well, making the whole enterprise feel like an abject waste of everyone's time.
The emotional subtext of this film actually has some potential. It turns out that Michael has actually cheated on Tara before, and that she's still struggling to move on from that. The movie could imply a complex interplay of emotions here. It could talk about the futility of keeping score in a relationship, or the permanence of betrayal, in spite of a willingness to forgive. But the movie isn't really smart enough to get into any of that. It is mostly about what happens when you sleep with a crazy dude. There is no nuance to Patrick. He is nuts and completely undeserving of sympathy. This all leads into a narrative that is devoid of intrigue.
Patrick, as evil as he is, doesn't even do much that actually feels dangerous. His first big act of malice entails calling up all of Tara's wedding vendors and telling them that the wedding is canceled. This is more of a prank than a crime, and though it's certainly a stressful situation, it's hardly compelling. And again, all of this could be solved if Tara just had the good sense to call the police. One could try to explain that away by saying she was worried about Michael learning of her indiscretion, but the film makes it clear that it doesn't even matter.
The film only gets more tedious as it goes on. The story builds to a climax that is only possible because the main characters are so strangely unwilling to deal with the threat that Patrick represents. There are long stretches in the film where one can even forget that Patrick is still around, his presence just so unimportant to the protagonists. The acting is at about the level one would expect from this kind of movie which is to say that it's a mixed bag. Wes Bentley is certainly trying. Jaimie Alexander clearly struggles with her character's inaction. And Cam Gigandet is an indistinct hunk of meat.
If Broken Vows had come out in the nineties, at the height of films like Fatal Attraction and the like, it would already be dismissed as a subpar copycat. In 2016, its existence is downright baffling. There isn't a hint of irony in its creation, but it almost feels like a joke. It is just so aggressively stupid and badly that it is tough to imagine that the professionals behind this film could possibly think anything they were doing was worth putting out into the world. But here we are, the film a badly done relic of a past not worth revisiting.
My Rating:
