Stream It Or Skip It?

With The Map That Leads to You (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), it’s impossible not to invoke the modern master of the weepie, Nicholas Sparks. It all but gets on its knees and begs us to remember Dear John and Safe Haven, two Sparks adaptations and weepie romances directed by Lasse Hallstrom, who emerges from a relative career quiet period to helm The Map and hammer us with cliches until we cry ugly like a blobfish that just dropped its phone in the toilet. The Map That Leads To You is also based on a book, by J.P. Monninger, which I’d wager is frequently left behind in the little pocket on the back of the airplane seat in front of you. But the movie likely has a built-in audience thanks to its cast, led by Madelyn Cline of Outer Banks fame, and KJ Apa, a.k.a. Archie from Riverdale – not that they have much of substance to work with here.

The Gist: These three young women barely make the train to Barcelona, which drives Heather (Cline) crrrrrrrrazzzzzyyyyyy. She’s a Type A checklist checker-offer who has everything in her life meticulously planned out, and might melt all the way down to a goo wad on the carpet should the schedule go awry. She and besties Connie (Sofia Wylie) and Amy (Madison Thompson) are on a postgrad trip through Europe, staying at hostels and seeing all the Instagrammable sights from Paris to Amsterdam to Barcelona, whooping and chattering like young, excitable people do. It’s cute. But not as cute as Jack (Apa) when he climbs into the railcar luggage rack above their heads so he can stretch out and sleep. Not surprisingly, he fails at getting some shuteye, so he chats up Heather by noticing she’s being pretty cheesy by reading Hemingway’s Spain-set The Sun Also Rises on her trip to Spain – and then sharing that he’s reading it too. 

So. Are these two destined to at least watch the bulls run in Pamplona? No spoilers, but yeah, almost certainly. Connie pairs up with Jack’s friend Raef (Orlando Norman) and power-partying Connie hooks up with a creep who steals her belongings but they end up chasing him off in his underwear – and not only does she get her stuff back, but Jack swipes a big wad of the creep’s cash to fund their fun-having for the next few days. Jack and Heather get some one-on-one time that finds them wandering the city all night, and – hey, wait a minute, are they Before Sunrise-ing? Sure seems like it, albeit with incredibly bland conversation to counter all the lovely scenery.

Heather shares that she’s living her heavily planned life: Graduate, go to Europe, then fly to New York and start the banking job she has lined up. She already has an apartment and everything. Jack isn’t nearly as structured; he just goes wherever, whenever and figures out things like food and shelter as needed. But he’s not 100 percent unstructured – no, this is the type of movie that needs something “deep” and “poignant” and “meaningful” to drive the plot, so it has Jack visiting all the sights from his great grandfather’s journal documenting his travels after WWII ended. So what we have here is a good old fashioned Opposites Attract situation where Itinerary Girl meets Go With The Flow Boy, and maybe they’ll learn something about themselves as they spend time with each other. They’re in luff enough that Heather lets Jack convince her to – insert gasp here – extend her vacation, thus defying her holy life script. But. Jack isn’t telling her everything, and at this point, we’re forced to wonder if he’s either dying of a horrible disease or wanted by INTERPOL. And then Jack says, “And then I had this health scare,” and I can confirm that this movie is too annoyingly sincere for that to be a fib.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, Netflix gave us its version of this plot with My Oxford Year just a few weeks back, so now it’s Amazon’s turn.

Performance Worth Watching: Considering the vapidity of the on-screen performances here (blame the snoozer screenplay), we have to nod to cinematographer Elias M. Felix for making this movie an easy-on-the-eyes travelogue that doesn’t adhere to the usual flat-’n’-dull visuals of too many direct-to-streaming features.

Memorable Dialogue: Jack’s uh-oh moment: “I told you from day one that I don’t live in the future.”

Sex and Skin: Some PG-13 under-the-covers canoodles, funny butts pressed against shower doors. 

Our Take: There’s a scene in The Map That Leads to You in which Jack muses, “Does anyone ever really know where they’re going?” And this is when we realize we know exactly where this story is going, the movie blissfully unaware of the irony it’s stumbling over. So it’s kind of dumb, but not laughably dumb like Sparks’ crassly manipulative melodramas, which seem contrived to be things you love or hate or love to hate. The Map That Leads to You is a nice movie, and I use that qualifier with malice. It’s nice. So nice. So very f—ing nice. There are considerable stretches of this story that feature lots of pretty photography and not much else. I wanted to put it in gear and push it down the road and pop the clutch to get it even modestly revved up, but someone put sand in the gas tank and a banana in the tailpipe, so here we sit, bored and staring at postcards.

Or, god forbid, vacation photos on your phone. There’s a moment when Jack spots a woman with a selfie stick, prompting his tirade about living in the moment instead of always trying to capture and save moments for the future. Easy for the guy who’s probably dying to say, right? But there’s something to be said about staying present instead of wallowing in nostalgia or, more to the point of this film and the flimsy, flimsy contents of Heather’s character, worrying about and plotting one’s future all the time. Heather pushes back against the tirade by saying Instagrammers are just chronicling their journeys like Jack’s Great-Grandad did, which, hey, nice try. Great-Grandad put together a work of art in a moleskin notebook, sketching the sights by hand and writing in longhand cursive, and the carn-sarned kids these days, with their social medias and shit, don’t even know how to do that.

Otherwise, The Map leads us to not think about much of anything besides where Heather has been carrying her ludicrous number of wardrobe changes; maybe she borrowed Dora the Explorer’s bottomless backpack. There’s a sweet moment in a cable car over Barcelona, a pretty boat ride along the Spanish coast and lots of harps and classical guitars plucked and strum over washy montages. The third act briefly teases a potentially insightful development, but disappointingly veers back to the path heavily traveled. The following exchange between Jack and Heather ends up being representative of the movie: “I never want it to end,” Jack says. “It’s very special,” Heather says. “You’re special,” Jack says. Congratulations if you stay awake during all this taupe, tepid dialogue. Nothing about this movie is special, and I absolutely wanted it to end. 

Our Call: A resounding and dismissive MEH for this one, then. The Map That Leads to You is a blah romance that flirts with being a decent-enough character study – and perhaps most disappointing to anyone hoping for a good cry, it’s a weepie with no catharsis. Color me underwhelmed. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.