Mother of the Bride, review: Brooke Shields doesn’t deserve this wishy-washy romcom
Two summers ago, Julia Roberts and George Clooney starred in the ho-hum Ticket to Paradise. They played estranged exes thrown together when their daughter got married in Bali; the film didn’t spin much comic gold out of their flustered reunion, but majored in sunsets, strained misunderstandings and sticky cocktails.
Swap Roberts for Brooke Shields, Clooney for Benjamin Bratt, and Bali for Phuket in Thailand, and you’ve got Mother of the Bride, an almost eerie beat-for-beat reprise on Netflix. The only significant plot difference is that the new pair were college sweethearts who never got hitched, and it’s their two children in later life – unbeknownst to either parent – who are tying the knot.
In theory, this should yield at least one bonus scene of hideously awkward recognition on check-in, but the script is too blandly functional to make it fly: Shields and Bratt just scrunch their faces in mock horror and try to get through it.
The film’s match-making subtlety, let’s say, is some way short of Jane Austen level. A sporty younger admirer (Chad Michael Murray, barely recognisable from his One Tree Hill pin-up days) is brought in to divert Shields’ high-flying widow from the task at hand, but this hunk might as well have “I’m not the one you really want” stencilled on his abs.
Miranda Cosgrove, as Shields’ daughter, will forever be Summer from School of Rock, but she’s kept that brightly winning, teacher’s pet appeal, doing better than Kaitlyn Dever did in the equivalent role. It’s still not much of a role, mind.
We dawdle through a side plot about the whole wedding being paid for by a megabucks sponsorship deal, which mainly exists to justify the extravagant setting without two parents who’ve been involved all along. It also lets the film semi-satirise how the “perfect wedding” is a bling nightmare with no personal component. The emphasis is firmly on “semi” there, though, because the coddling of the audience with luxury backdrops is paramount at all times.
The film’s more nothingy than noxious: Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) directs with vanishingly little of the snap he had back in the day. He could feasibly have been hired as part of the sponsorship package, approaching the gig like a sought-after wedding videographer who thought it might be fun to keep the bloopers in. The perfectly game Shields prat-falling in a spidery black dress that’s been foisted upon her, or walking in on a naked Bratt by mistake: these are the tittery set pieces we have to make do with. You could dutifully save the date, or come up with a million good reasons for skipping it.
PG cert, 90 min. On Netflix now
