The People We Hate at the Wedding

Talk about contrived? Yikes! "Eloise" (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) makes the cardinal error of inviting her estranged and dysfunctional family to London for her posh wedding. Her brother "Paul" (Ben Platt) and his boyfriend "Dominic" (Karan Soni); her unpredictable and unreliable sister "Alice" (Kristen Bell) who is having an affair with her married, architect, boss and finally her mother "Donna" (Allison Janney). It seems that they all pretty much loathe each other in equal measure, but they all decide to attend and in so doing "Alice" hooks up with the handsome "Dennis" (Dustin Milligan - probably the only decent person in the whole thing) with the others going through the usual relationship tribulations that, aside from a fun scene in a Thames-side inflatable champagne dinghy - rarely raise even the faintest hint of a smile. What Miss Janney is doing in this is anyone's guess, and without a song to sing I am afraid that Platt is just, well flat! I think the trick with good comedy is having characters that we can at least like. I struggled here with all of them before the ending that could have been seen by a blind man from outer space. The soundtrack is quite good now and again, but otherwise the writing and direction offer us nothing at all new here and it almost left me wishing for Henry Golding's equally lacklustre Christmas effort from 2019!

100-minute stinker of a movie with hugely unlikable characters.

Annoying extended family of losers reunite in London for a pretentious wedding. That's about it.

Kristen Bell is way too old for playing the sap having an affair with her jerky boss. Then there's Ben Platt playing a gay dope who breaks up with this boyfriend at the wedding of the bi-racial sister.

Then there's Allison Janney as the ditz mother who seems to be having an affair with one of her ex-husbands. My guess is they're supposed to be screwball comedy tropes but they come off as annoying jerks.

One of the stupidest scenes has the bride and her screeching pals going for a ride in a hot tub on the Thames. Gee, I wonder if they'll fall into the river.

Really bad.

I was excited for this movie because it actually has a lot of good actors. Ben Platt was great in the Pitch Perfect movies and Dear Evan Hansen. And Kristen Bell is pretty much great in everything I have seen her in. However, these two actors couldn't save this train wreck. Simply put, The People We Hate at the Wedding is a mess. The premise is interesting enough a dysfunctional family comes together for a wedding. But the pacing is all over the place. The jokes were really dragged out and often didn't hit the mark. They are also all kinds of terrible people with first-world problems, which just aren't that interesting. There wasn't a single character I related to or even liked. The pros are that it is on streaming, so you don't have to pay for it or see it in theaters. But I wouldn't recommend it and probably won't watch it again.

I'll start by saying something nice, it had high production value, and very lovely locations. It's a shame the plot, characters, dialog and other essential elements of a good movie were missing.

This is a poorly written, unfunny film. It was so awful I have to assume it was written by an AI, who took the elements of a funny movie but simply didn't understand how to write for a human audience. I've seen 3/10 star Hallmark movies with better developed plots and characters.

I genuinely like the actors in this film, but given the script there's no amount of talent that could have saved this movie.

I turned it off roughly 1 hour in, because I didn't care how it ended.

Allison Janney has been nominated for and won so many awards over the past 30 years that it takes a separate, linked Wikipedia entry just to list them all. For her mere presence in this movie I must give this movie an extra star on its rating. And Kristen Bell, of Veronica Mars and Frozen fame (and all the ensemble & supporting roles in both TV & movies that she's had in between), isn't exactly chopped liver, y'know. So then why isn't this made-for-streaming movie better than it is? Honestly, I'm not sure. But if you're a big fan of these women (as I am), or of the young Tony-winning star of "Dear Evan Hansen," it's still worth the 99-minute investment to watch.