It's tough being a fan of modern romantic comedies when studios seem hell-bent on killing the genre's appeal, retreading the same stories and peppering them with the same stale archetypes again and again. The result is often rom-coms as interchangeable as their leading ladies, and thereby pretty forgettable. Sadly, despite a cast that boasts such charismatic performers as Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Robin Williams, Amanda Seyfried, and Ben Barnes, Big Wedding appears to overburdened with tired rom-com conventions.
Written and directed by The Bucket List scribe Justin Zackham, the movie centers on the explosive family dynamics brought about by the wedding of Barnes' groom to marry Seyfried's wide-eyed bride. See, his biological mother is a deeply religious Colombian Catholic. And with her traveling in for the ceremony, he feels he needs to hide the fact that his adoptive parents (De Niro and Keaton) got divorced ages ago. So he begs the parents who raised him to masquerade as a married couple, forcing his dad's current wife (Sarandon) out of sight. It's basically The Bird Cage with a strangely more conservative point of view considering it's coming sixteen years later.
Check out below, and see if you share my reservations.
As much as I admire much of the cast, I doubt they'll be able to overcome the myriad of drawbacks this trailer reveals. From the lazy title to the heavy reliance on catchy classic pop songs, the slapstick-heavy senior citizen love triangle, Katherine Heigl in her standard frigid bitch mode, and Williams reprising his wacky priest shtick from License to Wed, this trailer comes off like a mash-up of the most flailing offenses of recent rom-coms. In short, The Big Wedding seems a real waste of its remarkable ensemble cast.
The Big Wedding opens October 26th.
