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| The Wedding Date
Directed By: Clare Kilner Plot
Summary - Review 1 - Review
2 - CURRENT REVIEWS
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| "Something Borrowed" centers around Kat Ellis (Messing), who returns to her parents' London home for her sister's wedding. Afraid of confronting her ex-fiancé, who dumped her two years before, she hires a top-drawer male escort (Mulroney) to pose as her new boyfriend. [TRAILER] Okay, I really don’t think this is all that complicated. For a romantic comedy to work, we need to believe in only one, simple thing: That the two people in question could, at one point in time, want to kiss. We don’t need to believe that they love each other, nor that they are falling for each other, nor that they are even a good fit for each other. What every romantic comedy builds to, however trite, is that moment when the boy grabs the girl and kisses her, and the camera either zooms in, pans back, rises up or spins around. And it is in this moment when we need to believe that these people, at this time, in this place, could actually want to kiss. If you really think about it, these aren’t exactly the highest standards. I think when most of us go into a romance, however, we want to believe in love and in happiness, and are willing to give most of these stories the benefit of the doubt if they can get that kiss right. Now with all that out of the way, “The Wedding Date” fails because we never once believe that its lead characters are kissing due to genuine emotion. In a transparent tribute to “Pretty Woman,” Kat (Debra Messing) hires a prostitute, Nick (Dermot Mulroney), for the weekend to be her date at her sister’s wedding. She doesn’t want to seem pathetic without a date, and wants to make her ex-fiance jealous about the hunk she snagged after him. At first the film has promise, with both Kat and Nick discussing Kat’s love life and Nick’s profession with a refreshing degree of candor. And for a while it looks like director Clare Kilner might have an interesting thought or two to toss into the collective debate, exploring just how much of a woman’s worth is determined by the arm she’s attached to. But then, after a drunken hookup, the story switches from a biting satire to an all-out, head-over-heels romance. Suddenly Messing, as Kat, morphs from the independent, somewhat bitter woman to the flighty and naïve girly in love, and Mulroney, as Nick, experiences a complete reversal from the man who keeps his mouth shut and his motives hidden to the love-struck suitor who can’t help from spouting romantic clichés. Consequently, we come to not believe who these characters are, what they say nor what they do, and when they lean in for that all-important, life-changing kiss, it’s something that made me scoff rather than made my heart soar. I mean, what changed? Kat got drunk, withdrew some money, and Nick did what hookers are supposed to do. Unlike “Pretty Woman,” and most other successful romances, we have absolutely NO reason to understand why EITHER of these empty vessels would EVER find themselves attracted to the other. Is it their 30-second chat about college majors and anchovies that’s supposed to demonstrate their affections? Come now, does this sound like a successful Valentine’s Day-season film to you?
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