Director: Jason Moore
Writer: Mark Hammer
Stars: Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge, Cheech Marin, Lenny Kravitz.
Synopsis: Darcy and Tom gather their families for the ultimate destination wedding but when the entire wedding party is taken hostage the bride and groom must save their loved ones–if they don’t kill each other first.
The red flags were on Shotgun Wedding as soon as Lionsgate sold the film to Amazon Prime Video in March of last year. And after seeing it, yeah, it’s as bad as you think a January slapstick comedy is going to be. There are a couple of entertaining moments that are bound to “break the internet,” but most of the film is a lame, tired, and cinematically unengaging comedy in which most of the plot is seen a mile away and its main drive, the stars, and the action scenes, are boring to watch.
Jennifer Lopez has always been the one to star in comedies with a zany plot, but most of them have failed (Gigli, anyone?). While it’s not as egregious as that, Shotgun Wedding is still filled with so many clichés that it’s hard to engage yourself in anything that’s going on. But Lopez does have decent enough chemistry with Josh Duhamel, who is arguably the best part of the whole thing. The two are getting married on an Island in the Philippines. However, on the day of the wedding, Darcy (Lopez) gets cold feet. But a more pressing problem arrives when Pirates overtake the island and take the entire family hostage.
It’s now, of course, up to Darcy and Tom (Duhamel) to repair their wedding and save the entire party. Of course, there will be some friction happening between the two before the wedding day, and the entire adventure on the island as they try to rescue the hostages will be a guise to reconcile their differences, come together to save the day, and get married. As soon as it starts, you know how it’ll wrap up. And even if there’s a plot twist that tries to spice up things near the end of the movie, it arrives too little too late and unfortunately doesn’t provide the depth it needs to make the film more fun, or at least more engaging.
It also doesn’t help that most of the film is unfunny – there’s a lot of crass slapstick humor that’s used to make the audience laugh, but none of it works. Lopez isn’t funny, and her comedic timing does not work, alongside Duhamel who seemingly has the most fun among the bunch, even though the material he receives is poorly written. As much as audiences enjoy Jennifer Coolidge’s contributions to The White Lotus which have dubbed her an icon, she plays her character exactly the same way here, and her schtick gets tiresome extremely fast. It’s not her fault – it’s the screenplay’s fault. Everyone, as talented as they are, spew the most predictable and unengaging lines. So even if they want to give earnest performances, the material gets hampered amazingly quickly that they’re unable to hold our attention.
The same can be said for the action scenes. In an action comedy, you want the action to balance out the comedy on display, and the action scenes to be funny in themselves. There’s one effective physical gag that I won’t spoil, but the rest of it is amazingly standard, sloppily edited, and contains poor CGI. Our suspension of disbelief isn’t there, and there’s practically no catharsis. The R-rating should allow the movie to craft some bloody and creative action (isn’t that the point of a film titled Shotgun Wedding?), but none of it is interesting, even when Coolidge grabs a machine gun and starts firing at everything everywhere.
This year, January has been quite good to us, with films like M3GAN, Plane, Searching, and Pathaan. I thought for once that “the dumping ground of movies” no longer exists. However, it seems that the “bad” January movies will now be relegated on streaming services, as the good ones will be released in theaters. If that’s the case, that means the tide has turned, and for the better. Here’s hoping that Shotgun Wedding will not be remembered by virtually anyone in a few days from now, and be buried in Amazon Prime Video’s ever-evolving algorithm.
Grade: D-
