“Marry Me” starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson asks that age-old question: Do you, viewer, take this romantic comedy to be your next cinematic diversion, to have and to hold from this day forward, or at least for the next two hours?
The answer, I’m afraid, to borrow from another well-known phrase: Let’s call the whole thing off.
Decked out in an eye-catching and impressively fun wardrobe, Lopez is Kat, a pop star who is about to marry her amor (also a pop star, played by the singer-songwriter Maluma) at her next concert. That we’re meant to believe this concert-as-wedding is not a blatantly self-promotey choice — nuptials as business write-off, anyone? — is just the first of the movie’s many emotionally disingenuous beats. Moments before she’s set to make her bridal entrance, the bad news comes in a flash on everyone’s phones — hoo-boy, this movie is obsessed with social media — and it’s a video showing her fiance cheating with her assistant. Stunned and humiliated, Kat rises up from the stage floor in her massive, glittery, crystal-covered wedding gown. and suddenly all that heavy stage makeup betrays her. No matter how much highlighter is slathered on those exquisite cheekbones, her glow is gone.
And then she spots a random guy in the audience — a junior high school math teacher and divorced dad named Charlie, played by Wilson, who is so low-key as to be no key — holding a sign with the name of her current hit: “Marry Me.” She takes that as her cue and impulsively weds this nobody on the spot and rom-comery ensues. In theory, at least.
Director Kat Coiro (whose credits include the Peacock’s “Girls5eva”) has mostly assembled all the necessary ingredients — plus a whole bunch of unnecessary ones as well — but they never cohere into a story that actually hangs together. It’s a ridiculous premise, but that’s not the issue; Lopez has stepped into her fair share of nonsensical stories and made them work largely because she has the chops and screen presence to elevate a light, fizzy script if it has decent bones. And I like the reverse-energy of the setup, which has the central couple falling for one another after they’ve tied the knot.
But the screenplay from Harper Dill, John Rogers and Tami Sagher is weirdly shapeless and has no real momentum driving these two crazy kids into one another’s arms. I say kids, but it’s actually unusual — and I appreciate this — to see a rom-com starring actors in their early 50s and their middle-agedness isn’t an explicit part of the story. They never once refer to themselves as old; their ages never even come up and really, why would they? (It’s fascinating to watch this play out coming off ”And Just Like That’s” approach wherein 50-plus means you’re over the hill.)
Rom-coms require an internal machinery and most tend to follow certain basic rhythms because those rhythms work so well. Unless you’re willing to upend that with some compellingly inventive alternatives — and to be clear, that’s not what is happening here amid the “Notting Hill” of it all — the end result is going to be as lifeless as the hairpiece Kat casually removes from her head one night as she and Charlie kinda sorta get to know one another.
Absent any chemistry or heat, Lopez and Wilson come across like respectful colleagues who have a pleasant working relationship. Scenes don’t really develop and an inordinate number of them feature Kat singing one song or another, rather than focusing on the ways people connect and fall in love, and when they finally do kiss for the first time it’s like … huh. Shrug. There’s no convincing build up. That said, Lopez has a brief but legitimately funny moment attempting to run in a gorgeous red dress with a very narrow skirt. More of those kinds of throwaway jokes, visual or otherwise, might have helped buoy this thing a bit more.
There are a lot of narrative shortcuts employed here — if I never see a montage of news reporting to set up a scene again it will be a happy day — and the actors themselves are forever shoved into chaotic Instagram Live feeds that crowd the screen, perhaps to distract audiences from the fact that the movie looks so conspicuously underpopulated. I don’t know if this was due to the budget or COVID, but “Marry Me” feels small in ways that a big commercial rom-com frequently doesn’t and maybe that’s why you can’t fully shake the feeling that this Universal Pictures project is really just a marketing scheme cooked up to highlight Lopez’s real-life music career and some NBCUniversal properties, including the frequent cutaways to a decidedly unfunny Jimmy Fallon, which may be, ironically, the movie at its most honest.
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'MARRY ME'
2 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some language and suggestive material)
Running time: 1:52
Where to watch: In theaters and streaming on Peacock Friday
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