The new romance “The Lucky One,” starring Zac Efron as a weary* Marine and Taylor Schilling as a beautiful stranger, is the latest in a line of film adaptations of Nicholas Sparks’ weepy* novels.

    As is often the case with Sparks’ movies and their imitators (including “The Vow” earlier this year), critics agree that “The Lucky One” is a tear-jerker* best left to hard-core romance fans.

    U.S. Marine Logan Thibault (Efron) is a man who returns to Colorado from his third tour of duty in Iraq, with the one thing he credits with keeping him alive — a photograph he found of a woman he does not even know.

    With this picture luck follows him wherever he goes. After his return from Iraq, lost after his near death experiences, he walks to Louisiana from Colorado to find this woman whom he credits for saving him.

    He is able to find her in a small town and learns her name is Beth (Schilling) and where she lives; he shows up at her door, and ends up taking a job at her family-run local kennel* without her knowing he has a photograph of her.

    Despite her initial mistrust* and the complications* in her life, a romance develops between them, giving Thibault hope that Beth could be more than his good luck charm. Meanwhile, her ex-husband grows jealous* of Thibault and does everything he can to break them up.

    In one of the more positive reviews, the Los Angeles Times’ Betsy Sharkey calls “The Lucky One” a “sweet but not too syrupy* romance” and the best Sparks-inspired film to come along since “The Notebook.”

    The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday is less impressed and describes the film as a “tepid*, inert enterprise.” “The Lucky One,” she continues, is “devoid* of genuine tension, conflict or combustible* chemistry between its two stars,” and “just prettily sits there.”

    So does Efron, for that matter: “The role of a stoic*, expressionless philosopher-soldier requires that he tamp down his natural exuberance* and physical grace, a regrettable* misuse of his native talents.”

    In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert also tackles the Sparks formula*: “They usually involve the triumph of love over adversity, are usually set in beautiful natural settings, usually involve such coincidences as finding a message in a bottle, and usually make me stir restlessly, because such escapism* is shameless.”(SD-Agencies)