Starring James Marsden and Michelle Monaghan. Rated PG. Now playing

Is it possible the Nicholas Sparks movie machine, with all its smooching in the rain and talk about destiny and stars, has finally hit a rough spot on its quaint country road?

The bestselling romance novelist has seen no less than nine of his schmaltzy books turned into films, with The Notebook the biggest blockbuster. And yes, they’ve all shamelessly jerked tears and stuck closely to the formula of unrequited love, disapproving parents, and hunky, lovelorn guys. But none has served up the recipe so artlessly as The Best of Me. The tropes are more brazenly exposed here, the characters broad, and the turn of events laughably contrived.

When hot, middle-aged Dawson (James Marsden) runs into his former high-school sweetheart, Amanda (an uncharacteristically glum Michelle Monaghan), he is actually wearing a sweat-marked tank top and working on a car. It’s the sort of soft-drink-ad cliché that even TV commercials have been making fun of for years. And here’s guessing even the biggest fan of Sparks’s weepers won’t be able to buy it this time out.

The Best of Me doesn’t seem to care that the younger versions of Dawson and Amanda, whom we meet in flashback, don’t even remotely resemble their older counterparts. It’s the old boy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks-hooks-up-with-rich-girl story, with promising Aussie newcomer Luke Bracey as troubled Dawson, son of a badass drug dealer.

We get it, so does his house really have to be such an hillbilly cartoon, complete with hicks who look like Cletus in The Simpsons shooting guns in the front yard and two brothers with Kentucky-waterfall mullets and neck tattoos? Amanda (Liana Liberato), of course, lives in a Sweet Charlotte–style plantation house with swaying Spanish moss. Subtle? Not so much.

All this can only lead to trouble, and it does, fatefully separating the two sweethearts until they reconnect in their small Louisiana hometown when an old friend dies. Dawson, who’s morphed into a blue-eyed, Stephen Hawking–reading oil-rig worker (abs and brains!), still feels the old pull toward Amanda, a mother locked in an unhappy marriage. Cue the rainstorm, the flowers, more talk about the stars, and lines like, “I had so many plans!”

But Sparks isn’t done with this pair yet. Fate has more in store for our unlucky duo. And by the end, as Dawson’s brothers might put it, you’ll be gol-durn tuckered out—and maybe even turned off rainstorms for a while.