LICENSE TO WED

By
Shannon Onstot
Community Relations Manager
KUNV 91.5 FM
University of Nevada Las Vegas
email: smonstot@yahoo.com


 

License to Wed is quite possibly one of the biggest disappointments of the summer. Not only did the trailers show every single slightly funny scene, but the entire film made me feel like I was watching a birth control commercial in more ways than one. The cast is lifeless and without chemistry, the writing is drab and frustrating and the props tend to overshadow the main characters. All in all, this one's a flop and I want a divorce (or at least my ten dollars back).

Ben Murphy (John Krasinski) and Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) meet at a strabucks and fall in love within eight months. Ben proposes to Sadie at her parents' 30th wedding anniversary party and she says yes, but only if they can get married in her old church and go through the couples training program conducted by Reverend Frank (Robin Williams). Reverend Frank says that to marry them in 3 weeks, they must abstain from sex and attend group counseling meetings. Then Frank puts the pair (especially Ben) through all kinds of rigorous tests, and Ben begins to beleive that Frank has a personal vendetta and wants to ruin the marriage before it even exists.

To deter Ben and Sadie even more from having sex before their nuptials, Frank gives them a twin set of Robo-babies. These are the most vile creaturesa I have ever laid my eyes on. The poop blue goo, snot pours from their noses and they cry constantly and shake their creepy little fists while they grunt and squint their eyes. Needless to say, Ben is completely frustrated and the scene he makes leads to one of many conflicts with his bride to be. I could see through Frank's counseling what kind of issues this couple faced. Sadie is a control freak and Ben is a laid back slob who would rather let her take care of things so he can't be blamed for when things go wrong. They do not communicate, and when they're not allowed to have sex they realize how incompatible they can really be.

This movie has so many problems, I don't even know where to begin. Robin Williams was so completely unfunny that I forgot it was him playing the reverend, Mandy Moore adds nothing to the story even though she has one of the lead roles, Robo-babies gave a better performance than all three of the lead roles combined, and the dialogue between characters was so stiff and unnatural that it sounded poorly dubbed by robots. Some of the conflicts Ben and Sadie have are pretty realistic and I could definitely relate to them, but not in the sense where I understood whee they were coming from. Every time they had a fight, I could feel the frustration rising inside and I wanted to reach into the screen, slap both of them and tell them to move on. Not a feeling I expected to have at a romantic comedy.

In addition to all of these problems, there are a whole bunch of little sideplots that are never fully addressed and should have been cut out entirely. For example, Sadie's sister Lindsey (Christine Taylor) has just been through a divorce, so in the first part of the film she is snide and offers only rude comments to the budding couple about their wedding. When Sadie is shopping for a dress and having some very major problems though, Lindsey is all ears and support and her divorce is never really mentioned again. Also, no one ever really addresses what religion Reverend Frank is, and in an attempt to make him appeal to a wide variety of people, I think he ended up being outright offensive. He was like no Reverend I'd ever seen, and I definitely didn't expect him to exploit all of the religions in one film. Maybe the writer should have just chosen one, then maybe he would have insulted less people.

At the end of the film ( I'll try not to give anything away, but that may be tough because the ending is so cliche), Sadie is sitting with her family and they're giving her advice about what to do in her troubled relationship with Ben. The way that the film is edited and the way the characters are shot when they're speaking made me think of those birth control commercials when a woman is telling her group of friends about all the side effects of a pill, but her words don't really match the way her lips are moving. This is exactly what this scene, and a few others, felt like. Nobody in the cast had good chemistry with one another, and I never beleived any of their problems. All I could do was laugh at their petty misfortunes, and I couldn't laugh at any of their jokes.

What could have been a cute little film was ruined by bad writing, bad humor, unrealistic plots, unconnected sub-plots and horrible chemistry. Instead of calling this film mediocre and forgettable and leaving it at that, the stupid little problems the couple had, and the idiotic jokes Reverend Frank made just left me feeling angry and jipped out of a good time. I know that summer movies really shouldn't try to be too smart or edgy, but give an audience a little credit and at least write jokes that make sense.