The Wedding Date: Chick Flick or Male Tale?

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great chemistry between Messing and Mulroney.

Cons: The story line...or the directing...get a little ragged toward the end- no biggy.

The Bottom Line: 
The Wedding Date is pure easybrain stuff, which some will find less than challenging. But for a playful time, it's a fun little trip.

Author's Review
Ever since Hugh Grant and Andie McDowell hit pay dirt in Four Weddings and a Funeral a few years back, the wedding/romance comedy genre has been keeping the movie box office hot. Huge numbers of libininous panting females flock to these movies to get their fix of hunk-a-rama mixed with ribald wedding-theme laughter. And if the truth were told, a fair number of males populate the audiences in these flicks too, getting their fix of babe-a-rama and for some, of both genders, their fix of homoerotica.

In these movies, or at least the best of them, there is usually an expensive wedding which displays the best of a $100,000 wedding layout as might be seen in a magazine like Modern Bride. There are often funny, handsome men. Things English often factor in. There are beautiful, klutzy women. There often are gay people mixed in with the straights. There is usually at least one brassy and assertive female. There is usually at least one bare and cute butt, usually male. Often there is something really embarrassing to the bride happening in the time leading up to “I do” at the altar. There is a threatened or real breakup between the leading lady and the leading man. And in the ending there is the promise of a long, happy night of multiple climactic bliss that would make all those E Dysfunction commercials on TV seem as tame as kids holding hands in the park. They are a sort of ultra-soft erofilm that Hollywood can project because wedding fantasies, especially formal wedding fantasies, are the stuff of daydreams for most women everywhere and not a small number of men as well.

The Wedding Date is not as funny as Four Weddings, but it has brighter people in the lead roles. And, like Andie and Hugh, they are both very, very easy on the eyes.

Kat (short for “Katmandu”, of all Nepalese things) Ellis (Debra Messing) hires a male escort, Nick Mercer (Dermott Mulroney), to pose as her boyfriend at her sister's wedding, which takes place in (romantic) jolly old England. Kat is no dummy; she is a dazzling redhead with great eyes, terrific chemistry, and formidable sex appeal. Her plan, an attempt to dupe and make jealous her ex-fiancé, who dumped her a couple years prior, proves to be her undoing. But failure isn’t easy; Nick is a terrific hunk with more than average intelligence who has a Richard Gere-like ambiance about himself as he helps Kat land on her feet time after time. In one (obligatory) scene, of course, she also lands on her back in his arms.

Kat’s ex-fiancé, her sister, her future brother-in-law, her parents, and her friends all seem as nutty as a fruitcake and make you wonder how two smart people like Kat and Nick wound up in the same universe as the rest of these people. You begin to wonder why a woman like Kat would fall for a shallow lame-brain like Jeffery, her ex. Or why Ed, her future brother-in-law can’t see through his neo-cuckolding. Or why a guy as smart as Nick isn’t hustling mutual funds on Wall Street rather than selling his, uh, services to lonely women as an, uh, “escort.” In these places the movie’s credibility suffers but for the sake of the comedy one must be flexible.

The real weakness of the story, it seemed to me, was the rough plot line that the audience is expected to follow. Especially in the final third of the story, there are a lot of things you will miss if you start to relax. And it is these subtle disconnects that lull one into numbness and thus stress the audience’s appreciation of the story. Were it not for all the eye-candy the script would make this a yawner.

The Wedding Date is certainly a cut above many movies in this genre like, say, Little Black Book. It’s not quite up there with Four Weddings, but it’s well worth it as a date movie. Debra Messing shows us a lot of big-screen promise (at least as much as Jennifer Anniston) and as for Dermott Mulroney- well, where has this guy been? He’s pretty darn skippy in this role, and I can see him following in roles like Gere has played or even (ta-da!) the next Bond, if Clive Owen doesn’t get the role.

A thumbs up on this one and go see it on the big screen. Save the DVD debut for Phantom or something. You’ll like this one even if you are un-chick and male like me. It’s got class.

Four Stars/***