The Wedding Date film review

certificate_12A

THE WEDDING DATE

Question: When is a romantic comedy not a romantic comedy? Answer: When it's The Wedding Date. As the title indicates, the film contains one of the most common elements of the genre when it climaxes with a wedding. Such happy events are usually able to generate enough good spirit to allow forgiveness for any earlier shortcomings. Alas, the same cannot be said of The Wedding Date. Instead the hope is that someone will spike the punch and the bride and groom, along with all the guests, will die a slow and painful death. It would only be fitting after the film had undergone the same fate for the previous 90 minutes.

The other question that posed itself was who, in their right mind, could conceivably have thought this was a good script? Did no one read Dana Fox's adaptation of Elizabeth Young's book Asking For Trouble and think, So, where's the romance? Where's the comedy? Sadly, the film's failings aren't confined to the clunky, heavy-handed screenplay. It's hard to think of anyone connected with this debacle emerging unscathed. Director Clare Kilner appears, on this evidence, to have no sense of pacing or comic timing. Stars Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney lack anything resembling chemistry and their characters come across as self-serving and insincere. It can only be assumed that whatever endearing or romantic qualities either possesses were relegated to the cutting room floor as certainly none are evident on screen.

Messing plays Kat Ellis, a single woman who hires male escort Nick Mercer (Dermot Mulroney) to accompany her to her sister Amy's (Amy Adams) wedding in England where her ex-fiancé Jeffrey (Jeremy Sheffield) is the groom's Best Man. It might initially seem a stretch that someone as striking as Kat would have to resort to paying someone to go out with her, but her irksome personality soon makes it all too obvious why she's alone. The $6,000 she pays Mercer is little recompense for such an assignment.