By Curt Schleier
The honeymoon is over almost as soon as LICENSE TO WED begins. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with brainless entertainment for a summer evening, but brainless and stupid — well, that’s a bit too much.
This really should be a good time for singer/actress Mandy Moore, particularly Mandy Moore the actress. All the pop tarts (I’m sorry, I mistyped. I, of course, meant pop
stars) who might take Mandy Moore-type roles are either in rehab or taking lessons in how to put on underwear. So, she has the entire sweet, virginal all-American girl category pretty much to herself.
That makes it more difficult to understand why she took a role in LICENSE TO WED, an insipid, silly movie — even by summer chick flick standards.
Ben Murphy (John Krasinski) and Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) meet cute, fall in love and plan to get married. But — surprise, surprise — there’s a problem. Sadie wants to get married in her family church, St. Augustine’s; the priest, Rev. Frank, won’t perform the ceremony unless the couple takes his wedding prep course.
The course consists of one pointless class after another. In one, couples are encouraged to fight with each other; in a different session, Sadie and Ben visit a maternity ward where they are forced to watch every painful birthing cliché ever used.
The course’s basic rule: no sex until the wedding night. I’m sure there are real programs like this, ripe for satire. But, when Rev. Frank actually bugs the couple’s room to see whether they follow his rules, the film falls over the abyss into stupid territory. I will say one thing for the Rev’s course: I like the "no sex" rule. Any couple that might actually take a course like this should not be allowed to procreate.
It gets worse. The concept of character development seems foreign to the filmmakers. Sadie has a male best friend, Carlisle (Eric Christian Olsen), and the extent of their relationship isn’t clear. Is he interested in her romantically? Is he gay?
In fact, the entire film has a kind of disjointed feeling, as though there were too many people involved in the editing process.
One of Rev. Frank’s little tests is a word association game in which Ben has to describe his fiancée’s family. He calls Sadie’s father pompous, though he hadn’t done anything to warrant that description. Was the pompous scene on the cutting room floor?
Unfortunately, there are about 90 minutes more worth of scenes that should have ended up the floor with that one. Consider the scene in which the jewelry store misreads Ben’s handwriting and delivers a ring inscribed "I hope we never fart." Pu-leeze. Don’t expect a good review or good word of mouth if you insult an audience’s intelligence.
Wanda Sykes does a typically hilarious turn as a maternity ward nurse. Her cameo is uncredited, and I just wonder if that’s the way it was originally. Or, did she see an early version of the film and insist that her name be taken off?