Film Reviews

Wedding Daze

• Rating:
• Director: Michael Ian Black.
• Starring: Jason Biggs, Isla Fisher, Joe Pantoliano, Joanna Gleeson.
• Details: US / 90mins (15A).

Wedding Daze is the third title chosen for this rom-com (the others were The Pleasure Of Your Company and The Next Girl I See) and this indecisiveness spills over into the plot. For about 40 minutes, Wedding Daze is funny and boasts some zippy dialogue, but then takes an ill-advised venture into absurdity and runs out of jokes fast. We join the fray when Anderson (Biggs) proposes to his girlfriend who promptly drops dead before she can say yes. A year on and Anderson is stuck in an emotional limbo and can't even look at another girl. Fed up with his moping, his best friend Ted (Michael Weston) makes him ask out the next girl he sees, but Anderson goes one better and as a joke asks waitress Katie (Fisher) to marry him. Looking for an excuse to get away from her wet boyfriend, Katie surprises Anderson, and herself, by saying yes and the two would-be newlyweds go about trying to make an impossible relationship work. It's an interesting start: we don't know much about Anderson or Katie and they don't know anything about each other, so as they get to know each other, we get to know them too. However, there isn't a lot to learn about them and what we do discover is rather uninteresting. As the movie rumbles on and starts to unwind, it becomes increasingly obvious that writer/director Michael Ian Black has no idea how to finish his movie, culminating in a scene where Fisher stands on a table pointing a loaded gun in the air and says: 'I don't know what I'm doing.' A Freudian slip perhaps, Michael? When Black runs out of jokes, he lets the romance take over, but he didn't build up the relationship enough for us to care if they end up together or not. Enjoy the first half, then catch an early bus home.

Review by Gavin Burke