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'Shotgun Wedding' Review: JLo Wasn't Going to Let Sandra Bullock Have All the Fun

By Lindsay Traves | Film | January 31, 2023 |

By Lindsay Traves | Film | January 31, 2023 |


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Can romantic comedies make a comeback at the box office? Are Julia Roberts and George Clooney enough to get the same people who watched Jennifer Aniston cutely stutter through the late 2000s to come out for more? Did Sandra Bullock change the game when she brought the rom com to the jungle? Never mind all that because Jennifer Lopez is back to vie for the title of Rom Com Queen and she’s doing it with firearms and a streaming service in Prime’s Shotgun Wedding.

JLo is in a wedding dress once again, this time as Darcy Rivera, a stubborn heiress about to get hitched to her midwestern baseball player beau, Tom (Josh Duhamel). Tom has planned their modest (OK, movie) wedding (on a private island in the Philippines) down to the smallest detail, even obsessing over the fairy lights he’s stringing on pineapples while his stunning bride-to-be begs for his attention. Of course, every wedding has its problems, like bickering divorced parents and their uncouth plus ones, unexpected hookups, and awkward speeches, but the ante is upped when Darcy’s impossibly sexy ex, Sean (Lenny Kravitz), makes an unexpected appearance. And then, of course, there are the pirates that hold everyone hostage.

Darcy and Tom’s day starts off with the two of them bickering over who is too controlling and who is sabotaging their relationship and it ends with them wielding firearms and rescuing their families from pirates. Along the way, they work through their problems and bring everyone closer together.

Shotgun Wedding is billed as “Die Hard at a destination wedding,” and that’s mostly apt if you trade in “grizzled cop” for “gorgeous glowing bride.” Yes, citizens are chucked into a deadly game of wits with international terrorists, but Shotgun Wedding is more reminiscent of films like Game Night where regular people are caught up in high-stakes crime scenarios and laughs ensue! It’s a fine premise, though the best that the movie gets out of it is having Lopez get a bunch of cool hero shots. The stakes are low throughout, the tone never rising to the darkly comedic levels of its cohorts, so it lives and dies by the performances of Lopez and Duhamel keeping the comedy and the heart intact. They deliver. I kept jotting “Lopez is funny,” because she is. Both her line deliveries and her physical comedy prowess mixed with her looking stunning in her costumes (shoutout to designer Mitchell Travers) keep the bit afloat when it starts to sink in the surrounding waters. Duhamel is fine and mostly works to match Lopez, he seems perfect as the insecure hottie just amazed by his future wife.

The reason so much is on their shoulders is because the ensemble cast isn’t given much to do. Cheech Marin as Darcy’s wealthy father is mostly relegated to some spoiled fatherly chatter, Lenny Kravitz feels like a cameo that didn’t end, and D’Arcy Carden is miscast as the malevolent gold-digging girlfriend and the result is her stumbling over exposition-heavy jokes. Jennifer Coolidge as Tom’s mom (I’ll let you look up their age difference on your own) should have been a slam dunk, especially coming off of her stellar performance as a woman on vacation magnificently wielding a gun for the first time, but most of what she says feels as awkward as you imagine it would be for an award-winning actress stuffed into a bit part with underwritten jokes.

As a vehicle to watch Jennifer Lopez kick ass in variations of a beautiful wedding dress, Shotgun Wedding is a “something to watch” kind of movie that gives us a low-stakes romantic comedy. Despite its fantastical setup, it never becomes anything more than light fare, which will probably relegate it to a streaming graveyard after a couple of weekends on the suggested banner.