Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge, Callie Hernandez, Cheech Marin, and others
Director: Jason Moore
Where to watch: Lionsgate Play
Rating: 1 star
A destination wedding, a deserted island, pirates, guns, and blasts - these are the ingredients of the Jason Moore-directed romantic comedy Shotgun Wedding, which neither has the romance nor the laughs going in its favour. Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel as the bride Darcy Rivera and the groom Tom Fowler try their best to salvage the film, but their desperate attempts go in vain.
Darcy wants a peaceful quiet wedding, but Tom has booked a private island in the Philippines for their grand nuptials. Darcy's parents are separated and her affluent dad Robert Rivera (Cheech Marin) invites his new girlfriend Harriet (D'Arcy Carden) to the grand wedding with her sophisticated mother Renata Ortiz (Sonia Braga) in attendance too.
Tom's mother Carol Fowler (Jennifer Coolidge) is the one who doesn't let the bride and the groom spend the night before their marriage together as she considers it a bad omen. Darcy's ex-boyfriend Sean Hawkins (Lenny Kravitz) makes a grand entry in a chopper and starts stealing the limelight from the entire festivities. Things go awry when pirates hijack the wedding and the couple begins having second thoughts about spending the rest of their lives together.
What could have been a fun watch turns into a boring drag fest, even when the film is just an hour and forty minutes in length. The performances are insignificant, the characters lack any depth, the writing is poor, and the direction is simply mediocre. The action scenes too look monotonous.
It isn't like Shotgun Wedding was aiming for an Oscar nomination, but still, the least the romantic comedy could have provided was a few genuine laughs and a couple of lovely moments between its lead pair. The writing by Mark Hammer provides neither and one starts wondering why the film was even greenlighted. Well, Lopez is one of the producers in the film so thankfully we have at least an answer to that question because you won't find answers for logic and rationality in this film.
The jokes fall flatter than The Kapil Sharma Show's antics. Even a couple of twists and turns in the last fifteen minutes, including the reveal of the main villain among the wedding guests, are half-baked and dull. The random wedding videos on YouTube are definitely a better watch than this entire film.
Shotgun Wedding relies heavily on Jennifer Lopez's shoulders, but even JLo finds this abysmal wedding a bit too much for herself. Josh Duhamel makes his best efforts to support her but fails miserably. It is easy to believe the script exploded itself into tatters, just as the grenades did in the film.
Shotgun Wedding is streaming on Lionsgate Play.
