Here is a romcom whose chief impact is the pure Twilight Zone weirdness of realising that it could have been made at any time in the last 20 years with the same lead actors: the luxuriously preserved Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. The borrowings from Richard Curtis are of the same general vintage and the closing credits deliver a cutesy and unearned homage to the faux-genuine couple testimonies from When Harry Met Sally.
With her legendary radioactive humourlessness, Lopez plays Kat, a singer with a gigantic social media following poised to bring off the publicity coup of the millennium: she is going to perform her massive hit, Marry Me, with her fiance Bastian (played by Colombian music star Maluma) after which they will get married on stage in front of a live global audience. But just as she is about to go on, everyone’s phones are alive with the scandalous news that Bastian has cheated on her.
Piteously alone, Kat sees Charlie (Wilson) in the crowd: an adorable single dad and math teacher who happens at that moment to be holding the “Marry Me” placard that his tween daughter Lou (Chloe Coleman), a massive Kat fan, has brought with her. Impulsively, defiantly, Kat beckons this sensitive everyman up on stage; the lovably bewildered guy complies (for his awestruck daughter’s sake, natch) and the ceremony goes ahead. They know it’s just a stunt – and yet Charlie’s real, ordinary life and genuine values entrance lonely Kat as they get to know each other. Will they get married for real? Or will Kat be tempted back to the world of super-rich celebrity and leave poor Charlie in his civilian slum of yucky non-famousness?
Everything about the film is machine-tooled and algorithmically calculated, right down to the chilling refusal to talk about Lou’s mother (who cares, right?) and the fact that Charlie has been given a lovable dog. Wilson is so robotically bland that in 20 or 100 years’ time I fully expect Marry Me to be remade starring the if-anything-younger-looking Jen and Owen.
• Marry Me is released on 11 February in the US and UK.
