Love and Honor (2013)

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.

Every scene of Danny Mooney’s directorial debut is brightly lit, every car squeaky clean, every moral dilemma transparent, with evidently thorough period detail undone by production values that lend even the riots an idyllic glow, while foiling the potential for truly dramatic conflict with leaden dialogue and predictable changes of heart.

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.