The Big Wedding

Disaster
This could have been a fine romantic comedy and heartwarming family drama, but it turned out to be nothing more than an extension of its trailer, having revealed the entire plot, and a total waste of talent at its disposal. Directed by Justin Zackham, who also adapted the screenplay from the 2006 French-Swiss movie Mon Frere Se Marie, The Big Wedding is light on laughs, and even lighter in its dramatic, emotional moments, making it cold and distant, and never quite achieving anything in its featherweight treatment.

Imagine the likes of Robert De Niro, Katherine Heigl, Diane Keaton, Amanda Seyfried, Topher Grace, Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams in your cast list. Filmmakers will kill to get a fraction of that talent in their movies, and Zackham showed prime example just how to flush everyone down the toilet. It's true that if you get good talent, it's half the job done, but being unable to manage and direct, exposed how everyone can just go through the motions to get that paycheck for bill payments. Clocking at less than 90 minutes, everyone has a little bit of screen time, just to turn up, play their caricatures, then retire into the sunset. The premise was set, but hardly anything of note happens, with convenience pretty much summed everything up, and its supposed surprises being pulled off as desperate attempts to add flavour to the mix.

De Niro plays Don, who has for many years divorced his wife Ellie (Keaton), and is now in a relationship with Bebe (Sarandon). They all get together when their adopted kid Alejandro (Ben Barnes) is about to get married to Missy (Seyfried), and one would expect hilarity to ensue because of the clash of characters, and hidden agendas amongst all players. Then there's the big lie they have to put up with, because Alejandro's biological mother Madonna (Patricia Rae) is scheduled to attend his wedding, but seriously, at this point, everything had sounded terribly tedious.

The narrative then tried to boost its other areas and subplots to pad up the screen time, so we have Don and Ellie's other kids turn up to. Heigl plays Lyla, who has daddy issues and boyfriend woes, while Grace plays virgin Jared, who has the hots for Alejandro's biological sister Nuria (Ana Ayora), a Columbian who plays up Zackman's fantasy that South American girls are hot, and are willing to fulfill all sexual fantasies of American men. Robin Williams was nothing more than a cameo playing a priest, which he had already done to better results in License to Wed.

So expect the usual bickering when characters go head up against one another, especially with Missy's parents Barry (David Rasche) and Muffin (Christine Ebersole) doing nothing but to provide one liner revelations of their entanglements with the main family members. Surely this could have been that fine comedy when everything comes crashing down at one large, social gathering, but alas, The Big Wedding fell flat on its face, not knowing exactly what to do with talent and hand, and hampered by an extremely unmoving, and uninspiring story that didn't even try to be smart, since it can't get through to hearts, being without one of its own to begin with.

One of the worst films of the year? Well, it's a possibility, given its unbelievable criminal waste of talent. If you don't know what boring means, then you just might want to grit your teeth and sit through this. This film is big, on nothing and emptiness.