License to Wed Review
by Drew Turney
There’s nothing sadder than a Hollywood giant who’s proven
himself to successive generations of fans and fickle studio executives,
who then coasts along in a studio packaged romantic comedy with even
their unique comic personality toned right down in the face of a
family-friendly rating and an asinine script.
Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson were from opposite ends of the acting style spectrum but when they came together for Anger Management they
confounded expectations, their respective personas breaking the banks
of the rom-com genre and making it into their own, even giving the film
a smart twist that clo sed it off nicely.
You hope for at least one of the above qualities in License to Wed,
but the filmmaking-by-committee result is a tepid, barely-funny
exercise that probably wouldn’t even have been made without Williams’
involvement. So it’s ironic his role as Reverend Frank could have been
filled by any TV-grade comic from the past half century.
He
plays a progressive catholic priest who specialises in intensive
training of couples to road test their worthiness to be together prior
to the big day.
Cue a lot of unfunny,
seen-them-a-million-times gags of violated privacy and humiliation as
newlyweds-to-be Sadie (Moore) and Ben (Krasinski) suffer the
indignities of being told they’re not to sleep together until the
wedding, they have to play-act imagined fights and more. Worse still,
Sadie thinks it’s all a great idea while the hapless Ben not only
doesn’t forbid the whole operation and deck the offending cleric but
goes along with it all.
Reverend Frank isn’t the idiot you
expect from such a set-up, and with his sidekick – a kid who looks like
a lactose intolerant Damien Thorne, you expect their kooky program to
actually be a very smart way of rooting out a problem Sadie and Ben
don’t even know they have.
If it had been, it might have saved
the movie as well as the marriage. Instead the two let the whole thing
get inexplicably under their skin and the same old boring romantic
movie crisis and resolution ensues.
For a long time Moore seemed
like she was going to be a pop princess in the movies forever, but she
deserves a little credit for taking on the role of a real person.
But
Williams is the biggest disappointment. At his most switched on, he’d
be like a whirlwind through a glass factory in a bland comedy like
this. They must have caught him when he had the flu, or maybe he’s just
getting older and figures he doesn’t need to prove anything any more
and can laugh all the way to the bank by phoning in his performance and
taking the studio’s cheque. Either way, there’s nothing to see here. 1 out
of 5 License to Wed
Australian
release: 2nd August,
2007
Cast: Robin Williams, Mandy Moore, John Krasinski
Director: Ken Kwapis
Website: Click
here.
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