Review

Love, Wedding, Marriage

Released: 2011

Director: Dermot Mulroney

Starring: Mandy Moore & Kellan Lutz

Grade: F

After finishing Love, Wedding, Marriage I had the desire to retroactively raise the grades of all my previous reviews. This movie is so bad every other crappy rom com seems better by comparison. Love, Wedding, Marriage is directed by long-time rom com veteran actor Dermot Mulroney. Mulroney is suave enough as the romantic lead in films like My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Wedding Date, but his wedding-themed directorial debut trips down the aisle before face planting into a chuppah of horrible.

The film stars Mandy Moore as Ava, a successful marriage counselor who returns from her honeymoon to discover that her parents are getting a divorce, weeks before their 30^th anniversary. Ava decides to use all the tricks in her psychologist handbook to get them back together. It’s like The Parent Trap except instead of two adorably precocious twins, it’s a shrill twenty-seven-year-old doing the scheming. As Ava focuses her energies on forcing her parents back together, she loses sight of her own marriage to pretty-boy Kellan Lutz (best known for a very minor role in the Twilight series). In the great tradition of ridiculous movie-careers, Lutz manages a winery. Highlights of said career include a blonde assistant bursting into the room to announce, “Your interview with Wine Magazine is confirmed for one o’clock,” and later, “It’s your conference call to discuss the new chardonnay. They’re on line two.” The wine business can be so demanding.

Rather than focus on character development, Mulroney just tries to cram as many visual gags into the movie as possible. Here’s an old guy taking a body shot! Here’s a fat lady doing a trust fall! Scenes alternate between unfunny and painfully unfunny. And to top it all off there’s a bizarre cameo by Christopher Lloyd as a hippy-dippy marriage counselor.

There’s not a strong performance among the bunch. As Ava’s mom, Jane Seymour's biggest achievement seems to be remembering her lines. James Brolin, as Ava’s father, is trying a bit harder, but the poor guy just has nothing to work with. His biggest dramatic plot involves deciding to become an observant Jew, a thread that is neither enlightening nor funny. Jessica Szohr (Gossip Girl’s infamous Vanessa!) is fine as the slutty little sister, but she looks so unlike Moore it’s hard to understand why she was cast in the first place. Lutz is there to take his shirt off (which he does quite often) and Moore, who I like in other films, is just dreadfully whiny, manipulative and naive. To be fair, I’m not sure even an all-star cast could have made something coherent out of this script.

The writers, Anouska Chydzik and Caprice Crane, have only a handful of minor credits to their name (including a few episodes of the new 90201 and the MTV Movie Awards) and their first big-screen endeavor probably won’t have studios scrambling to greenlight their future projects. Characters say exactly what they’re feeling and continue to have the same arguments over and over again throughout the film’s painful 90 minute run time. There’s nothing logical to anyone’s behavior. Ava, a licensed marriage counselor, makes her own decisions based on horoscopes (a trait which is promptly dropped about halfway through the film). She also finds it incredibly romantic that one of her friends gets married to a hot Polish woman after a drunken encounter at a bar. This is a woman who fixes other people’s relationships? I can’t imagine her functioning at the grocery store, let alone as a psychologist.

The movie pulls deep from the well of rom com clichés- karaoke, couples classes, speed dating, depressed women eating ice cream out of the carton. In what I can only imagine was a desperate attempt to inject some energy into the script, there are one or two big “twists.” Not only are they unsurprising, they’re not even interesting. By the end of the movie I disliked Ava so much I was actively rooting for her marriage to fail. Don’t get me wrong, I had fun trying to figure out how many ways she could end up sad and alone, but I hardly think that was the intention of the screenwriters. The look of the movie is bland in a Pottery-Barn-catalogue kind of way, and it’s hard to get too worked up about two people whose reunion comes as they speed towards each other in his-and-hers convertibles.

The idea of focusing a rom com on a couple already in love (rather than one falling in love) is not a bad one. Unfortunately Love, Wedding, Marriage has nothing going for it beyond a semi-interesting premise and an attractive cast. I have a high tolerance for bad movies, but even I could barely stomach this one. Movies are meant to entertain, to provoke thought and to arouse emotion. Love, Wedding, Marriage fails on all three accounts and does so in such a shrill way, it’s not even fun to watch it crash and burn.

Reality factor: Ridiculously young, wealthy, beautiful people who meddle in each other’s problems instead of going to work. Thankfully the over-the-top physical comedy was kept to a minimum or I may have just turned it off. [2 out of 5]

Eye-candy factor: There are plenty of scenes where Kellan Lutz takes his shirt off, but not even a million shirtless Lutzs could improve this film. [3 out of 5]

Aww factor: Nope. [0 out of 5]