One of the most unlikely comic book movies of the year, She-Hulk director Kat Coiro’s romantic comedy Marry Me — based on the webcomic by Bobby Crosby and (an unfortunately uncredited) Remy “Eisu” Mokhtar — features Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson in the tale of a similarly unexpected pairing: Kat Valdez (Lopez), a pop star, discovers her fiancé cheated on her, moments before they are due to be married on stage. Rather than canceling the ceremony, she picks a stranger, Charlie (Wilson), a divorced maths teacher in the audience with his daughter and a friend, to marry her instead.
It’s an absurd situation, and responsible for a good many laughs in the first half hour, as it’s the only way you can react to the unfolding disaster without wanting to curl up into a ball; but Coiro makes sure the sequence, as contrived as it is, feel believable too, using the spare minutes beforehand to establish Kat’s anxiety about pulling off a perfect wedding. The parallels between Valdez and Lopez are pretty evident — it’s the first time she’s portrayed a singer since Selena — and you can’t help but feel she’s channeling her own relationship history into the character’s fear and heartbreak. Wilson, meanwhile, utilizes his easygoing charm to perfectly persuade you he would go along to calm her down.
It’s emblematic of Coiro (and screenwriters John Rogers, Tami Sagher, and Harper Dill)’s overall approach, which is to eschew obvious laughs in favor of gently contrasting the differences between Kat and Charlie’s lives, which sometimes results in great one liners, but for the most part aims to make you simply delight in them coming together. And there’s the rub: Marry Me is so determined to be a pleasant and relaxed romance, that it becomes plodding as a result — there’s a lot of sweet and sentimental scenes of Lopez and Wilson’s characters just getting to know each other, and enjoying each other’s company, but little else in the way of memorable comedy.
You can imagine the filmmakers wanted to avoid obvious scenarios, like having Charlie get sunburned on a vacation with Kat, or embarrass himself at a celebrity soirée, but what we get instead is so amiable it becomes uninteresting. For example, when Kat decides to attend the school prom as Charlie’s plus one, everyone is so awkward but friendly, and no one’s worried about a student playing a prank; similarly, none of the classmates of Charlie’s daughter Lou (Chloe Coleman) make fun of her father’s unusual situation, even though kids can be cruel! The film is so intent on being a gentle, conflict-free experience that Kat behaves surprisingly courteously towards her ex-fiancé Bastian (Maluma), which strains our credulity even more than the main premise.
Perhaps the movie feels restrained because of its PG-13 rating: its touchstones are clearly Richard Curtis’s rom-coms of the 1990s and early 2000s eg. Notting Hill, but those movies, as chocolate-boxy as they were, were also bawdy, foul-mouthed showcases for a lot of great character actors. Sarah Silverman and Michelle Buteau especially feel restrained as Charlie and Kat’s respective best friends, Parker and Melissa, raising an occasional smile by goofing off or trading barbs, but their roles are well below what both actresses are truly capable of. John Bradley, who was the definition of lovable despite not being particularly funny as Samwell Tarly on Game of Thrones, brings a similar level of charm as Kat’s manager Colin, behaving as the audience’s surrogate, and voicing our skepticism towards this odd romance.
The movie manages to successfully update the rom-com in several technical respects, including cinematographer Florian Ballhaus’s use of a 2.39:1 aspect ratio that’s much wider than the ones typically used in the genre, and a naturalistic tendency to let the background noise of New York fill the ambience of several scenes, instead of relying solely on John Debney’s twinkly, cutesy score; the musical moments are also well shot, even if they make you feel like you’re watching a concert film at points. For the most part though, it’s happy to just refresh the formula by having a woman be the protagonist — the one pursuing the male lead — and you can practically hear the script groaning as it begins hitting the familiar plot points (before you ask, yes, one character does wind up making a dash to the airport.)
All in all, Marry Me is a well-made love story that feels oddly inert because it approaches its high concept as inoffensively as possible. I couldn’t help but think about 2019’s similarly themed Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron rom-com Long Shot, which I thought was hilarious, but if you’re looking for a less crass and frenzied alternative, then sure, then this will do; you’ll still cheer for the protagonists, and likely be humming Lopez’s title song long after watching it.
But before we go, just so we’re clear: it’s bad Mokhtar wasn’t credited on this, and it renders the credits — which features various couples talking about how they met — rather ironic, since the comic the movie is based on would’ve just remained a script had he and Crosby never worked together on it. How strange it is that the film’s premise is more likely than an artist getting credit on an adaptation of their work!
