SAFE HAVEN (12A, 115 mins) *** Starring Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel, Noah Lomax, Mimi Kirkland, David Lyons, Cobie Smulders, Ric Reitz, Irene Ziegler. Director: Lasse Hallstrom

Author Nicholas Sparks is the king of slushy modern romance, tugging heartstrings with his emotionally-wrought tales of love lost and found.

His books are a perfect fit for Hollywood and thus far, seven of his heart-tugging tomes have been adapted for the big screen, beginning in 1999 with Message In A Bottle.

More recently, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams set hearts aflutter in The Notebook, Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried nurtured amour in a time of war in Dear John, and Zac Efron showed a sensitive side and his abs to Taylor Schilling in The Lucky One.

Safe Haven adds a touch of suspense to the usual gooey mix, opening with a distraught wife, Erin Tierney (Hough), fleeing the scene of a crime – perhaps murder, perhaps self-defence. The terrified spouse seeks refuge with a kind neighbour, Mrs Feldman (Ziegler).

She helps Erin to change her hair colour before the wife heads to the bus station with detective Kevin Tierney (Lyons) in hot pursuit.

In one of the film’s best scenes, Erin boards a bus bounds for Atlanta and narrowly avoids capture.

She travels far away from her troubled past and hopes to throw the cops off her scent by alighting early in the quaint fishing community of Southport, North Carolina.

In this picture-postcard idyll, Erin rechristens herself Katie Feldman and lands a job as a waitress at the local seafood restaurant.

She also secures lodgings in a remote cabin, and enjoys a flirtation with hunky widower Alex Wheatley (Duhamel), who is coming to terms with his wife’s death while raising two demanding children.

Unfortunately, Tierney won’t rest until he has found Erin, and bends the law to search for clues to her whereabouts.

Safe Haven is undemanding fluff that doesn’t stray once from a well-trodden narrative path.

Hallstrom, who directed Dear John, is in familiar, syrupy territory and provides the usual array of longing glances between the attractive leads.

Hough is luminous and there’s pleasing screen chemistry with Duhamel.

However, the shifts in gear between this fairytale coupling and Tierney’s inevitable arrival in Southport to expose Katie as a fraud are jarring, necessitating an overblown climactic set-piece involving all of the pivotal characters.

A revelation about Katie’s meek neighbour, Jo (Smulders), beggars belief and inspires unintended snorts of derision as Deborah Lurie’s soundtrack swells to emphasise the magic of this ridiculous moment.