Shotgun Wedding: Film Review
I loved Jennifer Lopez‘s previous two films, Hustlers and Marry Me, so I had high hopes for Shotgun Wedding. It has its moments of brilliance but doesn’t fully work.
She plays Darcy, who is about to marry “groomzilla” Tom (Josh Duhamel) on a beautiful private island in the Philippines. Their wedding day is spectacularly derailed when criminals turn up and take the guests hostage and demand money from Darcy’s father Robert (Cheech Marin).
This comedy often made me think about Romancing the Stone and The Lost City because the film is at its best when it follows Darcy and Tom fighting mercenaries through the jungle, tied together and dressed in their wedding attire. There’s a lot of slapstick comedy involved and their efforts to sabotage their captors are silly but fun. The action is more bloody and gnarly than I expected and that was a pleasant surprise.
Shotgun Wedding boasts highly entertaining action-comedy setpieces but I wanted the dialogue to be funnier. There are a couple of laugh-out-loud moments but I generally found it quite average and only mildly amusing on the spoken comedy front.
Lopez has made plenty of romantic comedies in the past but this one has an action-adventure and screwball comedy vibe in places. I didn’t really buy her as the ditzy, freaked-out bride at the start of the siege and she was much better suited to the kickass makeover Darcy undergoes later on (with a fabulous dress, boots and shotgun look). She and Duhamel worked well together in the physical comedy scenes.
Jennifer Coolidge is having a moment right now and she brings her trademark deadpan humour to Tom’s mum Carol. She’s amusing but she didn’t make me truly laugh (her style of comedy works better on others). However, she has an incredible badass action moment of her own that made me want to cheer. The other standout in the supporting cast was Lenny Kravitz as Darcy’s sexy ex Sean, who has a hilarious final act.
Shotgun Wedding isn’t a complete success but I had a lot of fun with it in places.
On Prime Video from Friday 27th January