Shotgun Wedding

Knight and Day, Date Night, Killers, The Lost City, Game Night and The Bounty Hunter are just a small selection of the films that are essentially based on the exact same story as the newly released Amazon reel Shotgun Wedding. Grandma and Grandpa, an American couple in their 30s, get into unexpected trouble that only gets more and more bizarre as the story builds, only to ultimately rediscover their love for each other. The set-up is worn, old, predictable, contrived and slapdash - especially when it's done entirely without subtlety or originality, as it is here.

Shotgun Wedding was directed by the man behind Dawson's Creek and Pitch Perfect and it's just as gaping ultra-American and pancake-splattered as the trailers had previously hinted at. Darcy (Jennifer Lopez) is tough, strong, and determined while her future husband Tom (Josh Duhamel) is neurotically nervous and detail-oriented. While Darcy wants to have sex every night, Tom would rather paste up the decorations and furnishings for the upcoming wedding, and once they reach the resort where they're to be married, a bunch of masked pirates step into the picture. Their wills and love are put to the test along with the ability of both of them to kill the pirates, one by one, via "clumsy" and Pink Panther-inspired "mistakes". It's unimaginative and poorly written, through and through, and the relationship between Lopez and Duhamel feels about as natural as a pair of really pumped-up Restylane lips.

The dialogue in this film is really quite deplorable, drenched in stereotypes, clichés and tiresome logic without finesse. The fact that both Lopez and Duhamel also scream for about 92% of the running time rather than talk like people hardly makes things any better. It gets yawny right from the intro and after the pirates step into view the volume of conversation is raised even further. It's noticeable that many of the scenes are improvised and the comic timing that Lopez but especially Duhamel lacks shines through throughout. It was originally intended Ryan Reynolds would play Tom and I can definitely see how the dialogue and empty space in the scenes filled in here by improvisation would have suited him much, much better. Wisely though, Reynolds took a multi-year vacation now after Red Notice as well as Adam Project which I absolutely think was the right decision and before Duhamel got the role, it was also planned that Armie Hammer (The Social Network) would play Tom (but the allegations against him made the movie company dump the fellow).

Shotgun Wedding isn't nicely shot or well-edited, nor does it contain cool production design, cool stunts, good dialogue, sensible acting or believable characters. Lopez is gorgeous as hell and Duhamel is dashingly hunky, but that's also really all there is to praise here, because Amazon Prime has already in January pimped out what I'm rock-solid sure will end up as one of the worst films of the year.