Wedding Date

Photo Credit: Eugene Adebari ©2005 Universal Studios

Kat Ellis (Debra Messing) is going to visit her sister, who’s getting married. Jeff (Jeremy Sheffield), the best man, is (stop me if you’ve heard this one) her ex-boyfriend.

Here is yet another one of those formulaic plots where the woman needs to recruit a male companion to accompany her to a wedding. This is, of course, so she doesn’t look desperate to her family/ex-boyfriend/sister or whomever else it is a director of a film like this decides to insert as the requisite hindrance to her self-esteem. How many times has this plot been recycled? Does the Writers’ Guild now have a scale rate for, “wedding sidekick subterfuge?” You don’t actually think she’s going to fall for Nick (Dermot Mulroney) the hired pros- er, escort, do you?

This film is as disingenuous about the disingenuity of hired companionship as was “Pretty Woman.” The difference is that “Pretty Woman” followed a less banal gimmick—i.e. “rich guy goes slumming.” Well, in 1990 it was still somewhat fresh. “Wedding Date,” however, has a story that’s been exhausted several times in the past five or six years, alone.

It seems as if numerous actors throughout this film have had their lines overdubbed in post-production. Actually, the entire sound mix seems unbalanced. This is an irritating distraction because your ears are expecting sounds to come from logical places at levels corresponding to their apparent distance. Instead, you’re hearing sounds jumping out too loudly, or dialogue that sounds like it was re-recorded in a bathroom. Either that, or my ears are damaged from the pain of listening to horrible dialogue from one too many romantic comedies.

I am kind of worn out with films that use prostitution as a device for either comedy or light romantic melodrama, rather than dealing with it for what it is: a business transaction—albeit one that happens, oddly, to be illegal in the country that produces the highest number of romantic comedies involving prostitutes.

So, she falls back in love with her ex, only to find out that he chooses this moment, wouldn’t you know it, to tell her he slept with her sister. Of course, the hired hard—I mean hand—gets in a fight with Kat, to lead up to the predictable and very dour punchline: “The makeup sex is great.”

All’s well that ends well, except for you, the viewer, having just wasted one and one-half hours in the loose grip of this copy-paste movie. That is, if you weren’t distracted by taking out the garbage or cutting your toenails.

Jack Davenport and Amy Adams also star in this exercise in pondering the nutritional value of styrofoam.

“You think like we look like we’re trying too hard,” says Nick.

“Exactly,” replies Kat.

“Exactly,” says this critic.

The special features are meager. The “Date with Debra” special is a perfect example of why I’m disinterested in actors outside of their roles. I don’t think an actor alone can tell you much about a production. That is, if they’re a good actor, they’ll remain focused on their role. But then, this isn’t more than a shallow exercise in the promotion of Debra Messing—of course the entire DVD centers on her. The distributor, NBC-Universal, is also the distributor of “Will & Grace.” You do the math.

The deleted scenes aren’t any more or less interesting than the feature itself. So I guess it makes sense that they’re included. Apparently they were only shaved for time, and not because the scenes that remain are more interesting.