The Wedding Pact

At the time of this writing, there is one other review giving the movie 10/10. Yikes! What we have here is a very light rom-com with good actors, a lot of clichés and some significant improbabilities in the story. However, it is inoffensive, it has high production values and looks very good, and there are a few chuckles along the way. You won't get any spoilers from me, but we all know how this will turn out.

If you go in expecting anything more than harmless light entertainment, you will be very disappointed. If, however, you are looking for 90 minutes of easy fluff that you could watch with your niece and your Gran, you are in business. Special commendation to Buddy the dog, played skillfully by Hooligan the dog.

When I watched The Wedding Pact I knew from the start that it wouldn't be a blockbuster but I didn't think it would be so bad.

Truth be told, the lead actors actually seem quite talented and both Haylie and Chris gave a great overall performance considering the awful plot. They demonstrate good chemistry, seem experienced and show a lot of potential. Scott Michael on the other hand looks a bit unconvincing at times but, hey, this was not Shakespeare.

What I really disliked was the poor, predictable, boring and somewhat unintelligent scenario.

I do not know much about directing a movie but quite a few of the takes reminded me of amateur movie scenes. There are others. quite a few of them actually, which are unrelated to the plot and just exist as time fillers, which is fine, even the best movies have them, but they were so random and obvious I thought the director thinks that the viewer is unintelligent. This is what urged me to write this review.

There is no imagination in the storyline whatsoever; it just feels like it's a product of a 9 year old girl's summary of a single Archie's comic book of 15 pages.

Overall I would say that if you have an hour and a half to spend, better watch something else unless you're 10 and play with Barbie dolls.

Okay, this movie failed on several levels: originality, structure, acting, casting, photography. Those were the aspects that caught my eye. The first third was just plain boring and stupid. But as the movie progressed, it became increasingly over-the-top idiotic and I actually enjoyed it.

I recently watched "Love, Rosie" with Lily Collins and Sam Claflin, which really wasn't much better but it had nice production design and the two main characters had good chemistry, and overall everyone just looked pretty. That movie knew that it had nothing new to say, but it was at least attractive. "The Wedding Pact" failed at this completely (with the exception of Haylie Duff). Why did they cast a man in his forties to portray a college student and then the same character in his early thirties? Why did they give him the world's worse wig to make him look like a freshman? What was with the aging bed'n'breakfast hostess giving subtle signs of nymphomania? And certain scenes were framed and edited poorly, drawing attention to this or that detail that actually had nothing to do with the scene. I wouldn't label this movie as "ugly," but at times it looked painfully fatuous.

Then we had the scenes that popped out of nowhere, and/or went on too long. The scene where Mitch and Elizabeth talk about a hot dog buffet they attended in college, and Mitch actually spells out that three hot dogs are fewer than twenty-seven hot dogs. The scene where the girl in the tube top pops into Mitch's car and her boyfriend follows her, and Mitch acts like a relationship counselor (is that his job? what is his job??). The towel whipping duel. The "Heaven's Angels" cult. The mix-up with Elizabeth's address so that Mitch almost gets on a plane to Hawaii. The Coppola-esque scene between Jake and his rich, domineering father. Where were these scenes supposed to go? Some of them seemed like they just existed for the sake of one punchline, or one jump-scare, or just forced exposition to tell the audience how we are supposed to feel about a certain character.

I have seen worse acting, but there was not one performance here I would call "good." The story was about these two star-crossed lovers who are made for each other but keep missing each other, surprise, shock, surprise, shock. It touched all the time-worn bases: the moment of attraction, the realization that it's love, the painful inability to express that love, the determination to come together, the rekindling, the conflict, the breakup, the reconciliation. I know you know this already, I just cannot believe they still make movies that actually go through all of these ancient steps with so little variation. Even Jane Austen would ask people to switch it up a bit.

But I give this movie 5/10, because in the last third, I laughed out loud several times. After a certain point the script stopped trying to make sense, and events just happened whether they had any reason to or not. I will admit this movie also had a few legitimately funny moments. Kelly Perine was probably the best casting decision, although his character often had nothing to work with. And, I will say it again, Haylie Duff looked attractive. I could see some careful attention to her makeup and wardrobe; I wish they had given the same amount of attention to the photography, or the acting (or any sense of logic in the story itself, but we all know that's not going to happen).

I do look for more in a movie. But in a world where big-budget bad movies pander to an audience they can count on (i.e. "Disaster Movie," "The Emoji Movie"), this low-budget bad movie was inane in an amusing way.

Never mind that you know where this will end before it even begins (it's not that hard to guess, but that's the genre and other genres have similar "fates" with predictions), but do mind, that the jokes do not work as good, the script is weak and the acting is matching all that (in a bad way).

The intentions are good of course and the movie tries to keep things interesting with flashbacks that are supposed to lighten up the mood or explain things, even if not necessary. Repeating a scene almost beat for beat, just from another characters perspective at the end does not help either (unless you have short time memory issues). Rather a waste of time than anything else then

My wife is into romantic comedies and I end up watching lots of them. Some I tolerate, some I even enjoy. Well, not this one. This is without a doubt one of the most insipid movies I have watched in a long time.

Rarely one has the chance to see a movie without a single redeeming quality. Well this is the one: the acting is bad, the script is worse, the dialogue is so dull it's like watching a pair of goldfish staring at each other in an aquarium, the characters and their motivations are so two-dimensional and cliché you feel like you are watching cardboard cut-outs acting.

It's not the worst movie ever made, it's just bad and dull and I cannot honestly recommend it to anybody.