Love and Honor

Save a weak police pursuit, events are earnestly depicted and involvingly played, even if the period re-creation at times feels overly burnished. Still, Love and Honor suffices as old-fashioned, pie-in-the-sky entertainment.

Liam Hemsworth, the Ben & Jerry Flavor of the Month, is a sexy Australian centerfold without a trace of an accent who can actually act. His love interest is Teresa Palmer, a fellow Aussie who recently starred in the zombie flick "Warm Bodies." They may be camera-ready smoothies who take their clothes off often enough to keep the teen dweebs drooling.

It’s a lightweight drama filled with heavyweight war-is-hell monologues, delivered by a cast that lacks the gravity to sell them.

Love and Honor may be politically clueless, but Hemsworth and the student journalist he hooks up with (fellow Aussie Teresa Palmer of “Warm Bodies’’) do make an undeniably attractive couple.

The deceptions and romances carry on as one might expect, all while the film makes some attempt at exploring the cultural shifts of the time period.

Hemsworth has presence, but he also represents this film’s biggest problem: It feels like a bunch of good-looking kids putting on a show.

Between the cast's modern hairstyles and attitude, and the paint-by-numbers set design and period costumes...the action comes across as a prolonged, dreary game of dress-up. That director Danny Mooney shoots his material like a TV show doesn't help.