Made Of Honor
Basically a gender-reversed remake of the superior Julia Roberts chick-flick My Best Friend’s Wedding, what we have here is what happens when a hugely popular TV star (Grey’s Anatomy’s Patrick Dempsey) decides to spend his off-season doing a project that should be virtually no challenge to his persona and acting skills. Dempsey plays a swinging ladies man (who apparently has no job but seems to have unlimited free time and money) whose best friend is a beautiful girl whom he has had a platonic relationship with for the last ten years. Right there, the unreality of the situation hits like a cold wind (guys who maintain close platonic relationships with hot chicks generally come up a little short when it comes to getting the actual deed done). After she returns from a business trip to Scotland, she informs him that she is engaged to a Scottish Duke and asks him (a male) to actually be her maid of honor(!) Any viewer should figure that the movie is dead in the water at this point when the basic premise such as this is so god-awful stupid. I will admit that the opening college scene showing how the main characters met (with Dempsey wearing a Bill Clinton mask and talking like the ex-President) is funny and charming, and indeed, most of the funny moments occur in the first 20 to 30 minutes. Also, Michelle Monaghan as the best friend Hannah is truly a rising star, and does her best with the material no matter how bad it is; We also get Sydney Pollack (in his last film) as Dempsey’s father in a couple of funny scenes, most notably when he’s getting married for the 6th time and yet he and his bride’s lawyers are still hammering out the pre-nup before she walks the aisle (including agreeing to 4 sexual encounters a week); however, the lovely and talented Kathleen Quinlan is blatantly wasted as Monaghan’s mother, and Kevin McKidd as the potential groom is as wooden as a Scottish oak. Then there is Dempsey’s “circle of buddies” who advise him on life issues during pick-up games of basketball (complete with token black guy and an ultra-creepy nerd). Also with apparently unlimited free time, they come off as the most bland and personality-free group of friends in movie history, probably due to the bad actors they cast in the roles. Finally, when the story shifts to Scotland to show us the wedding, the movie loses its pulse completely as the Scottish people are shown in a cliché way to be the most uncouth, unrefined people on the planet, while Dempsey is utterly humiliated by being forced to wear a plaid miniskirt-kilt complete with camera tilts of his tighty-whitie undies and subject to numerous gay slurs by his hosts due to his unusual status in the wedding. Overall, the whole film is based on how long it’s gonna take Dempsey to get the balls to tell Monaghan how he feels about her, and the entire affair turns interminable as a result as we wait for the predictable nonsense for conclude. In the end, recommended for VERY undiscriminating fans of the so-called McDreamy only…
4/10