REVIEW: “The Big Wedding”

By Krystal Lau,

HUB Correspondent–

“Marriage is a phone call late at night,” begins the clumsy and coarse movie of an unconventional family, “first comes the ring, and then you wake up.”

“The Big Wedding” plot is set on an attractive and young couple madly in love and about to wed. The conflict however, lies in the birth mother of the groom’s strong religious views and her intolerance of divorce. Adopted at birth, Alejandro (Ben Barnes) forces his true parents to relive their awkward couple days and pretend to be married for the weekend wedding, in order to convince his birth mother to give her blessing.

Centered on the concept of a family’s unconditional love, Robert De Niro, who plays the father of the groom, gives a convincing if not overblown performance of a husband torn between two relationships- his ex-wife and his current lover- and his ability to cope with decision-making.

Playing the needy sister of the groom recovering from a dramatic breakup, Katherine Heigl, flops and squirms, trying for quirky but ending up cliché. Amanda Seyfried as the bride seals the movie’s fate with her bland performance as a selfless and innocent heart-faced airhead.

The film progresses as the long divorced couple unearths some leftover passion and chemistry for each other, sleeping together the night before their son’s big wedding. The preposterousness of the movie only widens as it is revealed that the husband’s current lover Bebe (Susan Sarandon), is the former best friend of his ex-wife Ellie (Diane Keaton). To top it all off, Heigl reveals herself to be pregnant and without a prospective husband while soon-to-be brother and sister-in-law Jared (Topher Grace) and Nuria (Ana Ayora) are off having shenanigans in the wild; skinny dipping in the lake and flirting at dinner.

Hardly believable, the movie itself is punctuated by sharp scene cuts and awkward camera angles. With no chemistry between the soon-to-be-wed couple, the only thing that saves this flop of a film is the oddly touching and poignant relationship between Keaton and De Niro. Not romantic in the least, theirs is a love of friendship and trust; trust in the fact that they each can take care of their children, though in their separate ways.

Though starting with an unorthodox idea, the movie developed and climaxed into a generic and predictable romantic comedy, with not much to hold itself up except for the few odd elements of noticeable chemistry and a lengthy and impressive list of actors capable of a much more respectable performance.