Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on May 14, 2016 23:38:35 GMT -5
License to Wed
Dir. Ken Kwapis
Premiered July 3, 2007
Robin Williams was a huge presence in my childhood, towering over the 1990s with his unique combination of rapid-fire schtick and gentleness. But Williams was kind of like bacon: put him in an existing project and you’ll get something memorable and fun, but try to build something around him and you’ll get something obnoxious and gross. Let’s be honest: for every great performance he put into Aladdin or Good Will Hunting, there was at least one boneheaded star vehicle.
In the mid-2000s, Hollywood attempted to revive the patented Robin Williams Formula with three critically panned bombs. The last and most widely reviled of these was Ken Kwapis’ License to Wed.*
Twentysomething entrepreneur Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) has just accepted a marriage proposal from boyfriend Ben Murphy (John Krasinski) on the condition that they get married in the church built by her grandfather. Unfortunately, that church is presided over by the Reverend Frank Dorman (Williams), who will only marry the two on the condition that they submit to his wildly inappropriate marriage prep course. Ben is understandably put off by Frank’s behavior, while Sadie is mostly blinded by affection for her childhood pastor.
Reverend Frank is awful, constantly humiliating the young couple under the guise of testing the strength of the relationship. He has his child protégé plant a bug in their apartment, makes them take care of remote-control robot babies, and tries to get them to fight each other; and while the film seems to acknowledge Frank’s intrusiveness, it also takes his side. A more mature film might have portrayed Frank as a pushy but well-meaning figure, like a coach, but like previous Williams vehicle Flubber, the script takes things too far and makes him an irredeemable jerk.
You might surmise from my description that this film is interestingly twisted, like an A-list verision of the 2015 unintentional horror film Old Fashioned, but you would be wrong. The script is full of moments that have the cadence of a joke, but no actual jokes. The situations are tiresome; Ben’s typical dissatisfied married friend (DeRay Davis) makes me yearn for Paul Rudd in Knocked Up. Rather than let Williams improvise, as in the old days, his dialogue reads like a screenwriter’s plodding impression of Robin Williams improvisation. Altogether, the writing, direction, and performances are so passionless and perfunctory as to rescue the film from the outright disgust that its premise would suggest. License to Wed may not be the worst 2007 film I’ve seen thus far, but it is unquestionably the least.
Signs this was made in 2007
Additional Notes
Next Time: Transformers
Dir. Ken Kwapis
Premiered July 3, 2007
Robin Williams was a huge presence in my childhood, towering over the 1990s with his unique combination of rapid-fire schtick and gentleness. But Williams was kind of like bacon: put him in an existing project and you’ll get something memorable and fun, but try to build something around him and you’ll get something obnoxious and gross. Let’s be honest: for every great performance he put into Aladdin or Good Will Hunting, there was at least one boneheaded star vehicle.
In the mid-2000s, Hollywood attempted to revive the patented Robin Williams Formula with three critically panned bombs. The last and most widely reviled of these was Ken Kwapis’ License to Wed.*
Twentysomething entrepreneur Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) has just accepted a marriage proposal from boyfriend Ben Murphy (John Krasinski) on the condition that they get married in the church built by her grandfather. Unfortunately, that church is presided over by the Reverend Frank Dorman (Williams), who will only marry the two on the condition that they submit to his wildly inappropriate marriage prep course. Ben is understandably put off by Frank’s behavior, while Sadie is mostly blinded by affection for her childhood pastor.
Reverend Frank is awful, constantly humiliating the young couple under the guise of testing the strength of the relationship. He has his child protégé plant a bug in their apartment, makes them take care of remote-control robot babies, and tries to get them to fight each other; and while the film seems to acknowledge Frank’s intrusiveness, it also takes his side. A more mature film might have portrayed Frank as a pushy but well-meaning figure, like a coach, but like previous Williams vehicle Flubber, the script takes things too far and makes him an irredeemable jerk.
You might surmise from my description that this film is interestingly twisted, like an A-list verision of the 2015 unintentional horror film Old Fashioned, but you would be wrong. The script is full of moments that have the cadence of a joke, but no actual jokes. The situations are tiresome; Ben’s typical dissatisfied married friend (DeRay Davis) makes me yearn for Paul Rudd in Knocked Up. Rather than let Williams improvise, as in the old days, his dialogue reads like a screenwriter’s plodding impression of Robin Williams improvisation. Altogether, the writing, direction, and performances are so passionless and perfunctory as to rescue the film from the outright disgust that its premise would suggest. License to Wed may not be the worst 2007 film I’ve seen thus far, but it is unquestionably the least.
Signs this was made in 2007
- Three of Krasinski’s colleagues from The Office (US) have minor roles.
- Sadie’s older sister Lindsey (Christine Taylor) is unemployed and lives with her parents, and the film treats this as evidence that she is a selfish, contemptible dullard.
Additional Notes
- *The others were Barry Sonnenfeld’s RV and Barry Levinson’s Man of the Year.
- More than anything, License to Wed reminded me of the Adam Sandler/Jack Nicholson film Anger Management. But instead of a randomly jingoistic speech by Rudy Giuliani at Yankee Stadium (yes), this film ends in a version of Jamaica where the majority of men are Rastafarian and marijuana is legal and can be smoked on airplanes. There’s no point to any of this except to plug Sandals Resorts. I’m not the kind of guy who cries colonialism, but there’s no part of that digression that doesn’t gross me out.
Next Time: Transformers
