The Big Wedding (FILM REVIEW)
The Big
Wedding
Film Review
by Kam Williams
A-List Cast Can’t Save Atrocious Adaptation of French Farce
This picture is such a wholesale
disaster that it’s hard to decide where to start in critiquing it. I could talk
about how it is just the latest case of Hollywood
remaking a French farce (Mon Frère se Marie) which somehow lost all of its charm in the
translation into English. Or I could point out how it’s a slight variation of Meet
the Parents and even has Robert De Niro reprising his role as a macho father-in-law
less inclined to reason than to threaten to bust a kneecap or tweeze a guy’s
gonads off.
Or I could focus on how the production
squandered the services of a talented cast including a quartet of Oscar-winners
in De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Robin Williams and Diane Keaton, as well as that of
such seasoned comedians as Topher Grace, Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfried and
SNL alum Christine Ebersole. Or I might mention the telling fact that the movie
sat on the shelf for over a year before the studio made the ill-advised
decision to pump up the marketing and dump it on the gullible public.
Then there’s the homophobia and
racism, reflected in disparaging offhand, remarks about lesbian and Colombian
characters. Equally-objectionable is the picture’s frequent resort to
sophomoric sight gags ranging from projectile vomiting to sucker punches to the
face.
Perhaps most offensive of all is the
film’s coarse, off-color humor featuring a life-size sculpture of a nude woman masturbating,
a seductive wedding guest pleasuring her seatmate under the table during the
reception, and a relentlessly-lurid script laced with salacious lines like “I
can’t believe I’m being cock-blocked by my own mom,” “Go [expletive] a yak!”
and “My father had his penis in your mom.”
All of the above amounts to a bitter
disappointment, especially given the pedigree of the elite ensemble. Blame for
this fiasco rests squarely on the shoulders of writer/director/producer Justin Zackham,
who ostensibly was trying to replicate the lowbrow nature of his only other
feature-length offering, Going Greek, a raunchy teensploitation flick released
back in 2001.
As for the storyline, Mr. Zackham
lazy relies on “The Big Lie” cliché, a hackneyed plot device popular on TV
sitcoms since the Golden Age of Television. It basically revolves around
characters going to increasingly great lengths to hide an embarrassing fact
from someone until the ruse blows up in their faces and the truth comes out
anyway.
Here, we have Missy (Amanda Seyfried) and Alejandro (Ben Barnes) on the verge of tying
the knot in Connecticut, when they learn that
his birth mother, Madonna (Patricia Rae), is unexpectedly flying in from Colombia to
attend the wedding. Because she’s a devout Catholic, they don’t want her to
know that the adoptive parents (De Niro and Keaton) have been divorced for a
decade.
So,
instead of simply explaining the changed state of affairs to Madonna, everybody
agrees to participate in an elaborate cover-up to make it appear that Don and
Ellie are still together, even though he’s currently in a committed, long-term
relationship with Bebe (Sarandon). What a patently-preposterous premise!
The
escalating concatenation
of calamities adds-up less to a sidesplitting, screwball comedy than to an incoherent string of crude
skits, the crudest being a scene where an undignified De Niro sheepishly sports
a substance-eating grin after getting caught in the act of performing cunnilingus
between a widespread pair of naked legs.
Look!
A falling star! Make a wish!
Poor (0 stars)
Rated R for profanity, sexuality and brief nudity
In English and
Spanish with subtitles
Running time: 90 minutes
Distributor: Lionsgate
Films
To see a trailer for
The Big Wedding, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt9iqJA6RZM
No comments:
Post a Comment