Adapted from the novel by Nicholas Sparks by Adam Shankman (The Wedding Planner) and marketed for Christian audiences, A Walk To Remember requires a different kind of suspension of disbelief. Landon Carter (Shane West), an indolent, cynical senior at a small-town North Carolina high school, has looks, smarts, popularity (but with the wrong crowd!) and talent going for him but lacks faith. Sentenced to participate in the spring play after being busted for a hazing incident, he’s forced to ask school pariah Jamie (teen diva Mandy Moore, dressed like a refugee from Little House on the Prairie) for help with his lines. At first simpering and smug, Jamie demonstrates an inner steel (and irony) that slowly wins Landon over despite the hostility of his peers and the suspicions of her fire-and-brimstone preacher dad (an embarrassed Peter Coyote).

Not only does Walk almost reconcile religious squareness with hip, youthful ennui, it all but makes that squareness sexy. The courting is chaste but not unerotic — press-on tattoos, erect telescopes — and it’s Jamie who reshapes Landon, not the other way around. Unfortunately the book cops out with one of the oldest melodramatic gimmicks around, and the filmmakers follow suit, ending with platitudes that aren’t going to convert anyone.