SCREEN

THE WEDDING DATE

Martin Stein

There was an interesting tale here about love and lust, friendship and betrayal, passion and etiquette. Unfortunately, director Clare Kilner chose to completely ignore the story about a woman's secret affair with her fiancé's best friend and instead focused on Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney in a romantic comedy so pathetic that even the Hallmark Channel would have turned up its nose.


Set in England for no other reason than to give the cast and crew an overseas trip, The Wedding Date is a 90-minute version of Will & Grace but without any of the wit and sparkle of the sitcom—in other words, without Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally.


Messing plays Kat Ellis, a woman who is exactly like TV's Grace Adler in movement, expression and personality. Kat, still nursing the emotional scars from her fiancé dumping her years ago, is off to her sister's wedding. Rather than show up solo, she hires Nick Mercer (Mulroney), a high-class male escort who's handsome, knows all the right things to say, is polite, well-spoken and can dance. In other words, the sort of guy who would have nothing to do with gals like Messing, who has the figure of a 12-year-old boy, is weak-willed, needy, neurotic and prone to falling on her boney ass.


It would be easy to give away even more of the plot than I've already revealed. Suffice it to say, Kat and Nick meet, go through the step-by-step motions of romcom love (which seems to solely consist of being in close physical proximity to one another), fight and seem on the verge of going their separate ways, and then reunite. But it's not just the sad excuse of a plot that's clichéd.


There's a crying confrontation in the rain, a zany bridesmaid, a hapless Brit with Hugh Grant hair, and scenes that exist only to add another song to the soundtrack. If Kilner had seen fit to include a car chase in which someone runs into a flower or vegetable stand, we'd have all the bases covered. Instead, we're just left with the cinematic version of Will & Disgrace.

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