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Marry Me
Despite its rampant predictability, the 2022 romantic comedy Marry Me provides entertainment value primarily due to the unexpected chemistry between the stars.
Jennifer Lopez stars as Kat Valdez, a music superstar about to marry fellow super star Bastian in a live ceremony in front of millions, who learns minutes before the ceremony that Bastian cheated on her. Crushed but wanting to maintain a semblance of dignity, Kat points at a perfect stranger in the crowd and asks him to marry her. The stranger turns out to be Charlie (Owen Wilson), a sweet-natured, socially inept math teacher with a pre-teen daughter. And for some reason, Charlie agrees to marry the superstar in front of millions of people.
We've seen a million rom-coms like this, centered around two people who have absolutely no business being together spending the rest of the running time trying to find romantic common ground. Remember Hugh Grant as the humble bookseller trying to win movie star Julia Roberts in Notting Hill? Well, this is pretty much the same thing, except Roberts is a singer and the bookseller is a math teacher,
What I did like about this screenplay is that it addressed the absurdities of the situation from jump. Kat and Charlie are mobbed right after the ceremony and when Charlie is asked why he did it, I loved his answer. Then we see Kat address the absurdity of what she did and quickly decide to get in front of it, via a press conference with her and Charlie, probably my favorite scene in the film, where Kat and Charlie play the press like a fiddle. We love the bonding that happens between Kat and Charlie, but we know there has to be something that is going tear them apart and here, it's when Kat and Bastian's record gets nominated for a Grammy.
The screenplay could have used a little tightening...setting up the Charlie character shouldn't have taken as long as it did and Kat's moment of clarity could have come a little sooner, but Kat Coiro's sparkling direction makes us want to hang in.
Lopez appears to be having a ball in a role that fits her like a glove and generates actually chemistry with Wilson, which I really didn't expect. If I had a minor quibble, Wilson spent pretty much the first half of the film whispering his lines and Coiro has to take some blame for that. Latin pop singer Malumo is a smoldering Bastian, Sarah Silverman is fun as Charlie's co-worker/BFF and Chloe Coleman is fresh-faced and sincere as Charlie's daughter. No surprises here, but the journey to the requisite happy ending is just too long for a movie where you know exactly what's going to happen.
Despite its rampant predictability, the 2022 romantic comedy Marry Me provides entertainment value primarily due to the unexpected chemistry between the stars.
Jennifer Lopez stars as Kat Valdez, a music superstar about to marry fellow super star Bastian in a live ceremony in front of millions, who learns minutes before the ceremony that Bastian cheated on her. Crushed but wanting to maintain a semblance of dignity, Kat points at a perfect stranger in the crowd and asks him to marry her. The stranger turns out to be Charlie (Owen Wilson), a sweet-natured, socially inept math teacher with a pre-teen daughter. And for some reason, Charlie agrees to marry the superstar in front of millions of people.
We've seen a million rom-coms like this, centered around two people who have absolutely no business being together spending the rest of the running time trying to find romantic common ground. Remember Hugh Grant as the humble bookseller trying to win movie star Julia Roberts in Notting Hill? Well, this is pretty much the same thing, except Roberts is a singer and the bookseller is a math teacher,
What I did like about this screenplay is that it addressed the absurdities of the situation from jump. Kat and Charlie are mobbed right after the ceremony and when Charlie is asked why he did it, I loved his answer. Then we see Kat address the absurdity of what she did and quickly decide to get in front of it, via a press conference with her and Charlie, probably my favorite scene in the film, where Kat and Charlie play the press like a fiddle. We love the bonding that happens between Kat and Charlie, but we know there has to be something that is going tear them apart and here, it's when Kat and Bastian's record gets nominated for a Grammy.
The screenplay could have used a little tightening...setting up the Charlie character shouldn't have taken as long as it did and Kat's moment of clarity could have come a little sooner, but Kat Coiro's sparkling direction makes us want to hang in.
Lopez appears to be having a ball in a role that fits her like a glove and generates actually chemistry with Wilson, which I really didn't expect. If I had a minor quibble, Wilson spent pretty much the first half of the film whispering his lines and Coiro has to take some blame for that. Latin pop singer Malumo is a smoldering Bastian, Sarah Silverman is fun as Charlie's co-worker/BFF and Chloe Coleman is fresh-faced and sincere as Charlie's daughter. No surprises here, but the journey to the requisite happy ending is just too long for a movie where you know exactly what's going to happen.