You don’t need to be a major film geek to understand that when a movie’s main stars are an attractive actor and an attractive actress, they are going to Do It. Exactly what “It” involves has to do with your own degree of prurience, but you know they’re not just going to talk about the weather, politics, and the price of cereal. (Or at least that if there’s no Itting, the lack thereof is going to be the major point of the movie.)

The thing is, we expect the characters to charm us and the story to involve us on the way to the plastic inevitable. This is where the makers of Nights in Rodanthe let us down, and rather severely at that. Based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks (author of The Notebook and a lot of popular paperbacks that might as well come with pantyhose and lipstick coupons in them) Nights in Rodanthe stars Richard Gere and Diane Lane. They play Dr. Paul Flanner and Adrienne Willis, people who are not married to each other but who spend a weekend in an otherwise unoccupied North Carolina beach inn. Just to make sure you can’t possibly miss what is going to happen, there’s a hurricane scheduled for the weekend. He has issues (work has cut off his emotional life), she has issues (she feels guilty for not being a good enough mother to her two kids), but they’re nothing that gauzy sex and ethnic dancing can’t overcome. This is all settled by the second act, leaving us to wait and wonder what the third act conflict will be to spark the finale of the movie. It could have been any of a dozen different things, because these characters are so generic and unengaging that just about any time-filling plot device would have been equally adequate at padding the movie out to feature length. This is the first feature film for director George C. Wolfe, whose career otherwise has been in television, and the name value of the cast is all that distinguishes this from something on the Lifetime Channel that would make you fall asleep halfway through.

—m. faust