Netflix released another wedding-themed movie, Mother of the Bride, starring Brooke Shields. It follows right on the heals of Irish Wish, starring Lindsay Lohan, released just a few months earlier. Although wedding movies can be endlessly fun, Mother of the Bride was haltingly boring.
The premise: Emma (Miranda Cosgrove) springs on her mom, Lana, (portrayed by the still fetching 59 year old Brooke Shields) that she’s getting married in Thailand NEXT month. Things go south from there when Lana arrives in Thailand and discovers that the father of the groom (Benjamin Bratt) is the former love of her life, the man who broke her heart right after college.
Great set-up!
Both of their spouses have died, allowing the audience to enjoy a romantic ride. Will the spark be rekindled … or not? And the answer is … drum roll … total predictability.
Romantic comedies tend to be predictable. The devil is in the details, you know, things like chemistry between the protagonists; the directing; the script.
Chemistry
Think of the chemistry between Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally” or Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in “Sleepless in Seattle.” Pure magic. Shields and Bratt are functional, but not fabulous, as the love interests in the latest iteration of the romantic comedy genre.
Mother of the Bride plays like the director had a checklist of plot points he checked off with each scene in a race to the conclusion you knew was coming in the first 5 minutes of the film.
Rotten Tomatoes gives “Mother of the Bride” a meager 15% audience score, compared to 42% for Irish Wish. (By point of comparison, “When Harry Met Sally” had a 91% audience rating and “Sleepless in Seattle” 75%)
Destination wedding criticism
In a review at RogerEbert.com, Marya E. Gates was even more critical and made an interesting point about the spate of films built around a destination wedding theme:
“Maybe a film this shallow is exactly what this sub-genre deserves, considering how blissfully unaware any of these films (even the ones I enjoy) tend to be about the obscene privilege and wealth that someone must have to attend a destination wedding in the first place. Maybe, in some twisted way, the hollowness of this film is its own kind of criticism.”
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