The struggle was real. The struggle, in this case, was to enjoy this very rocky, wildly uneven, tonally chaotic, and weirdly overacted Amazon Prime comedy. Because sometimes it was perfectly sweet and funny and more of the time it was full of random scenes and characters who hate each other on a perplexing and seemingly unreasonable level.
The flick is about a three siblings and their single mother. The eldest sister has been estranged from the rest of the family (and living in England) so she invites everyone to the wedding. And they bring the mess and recriminations with them.
What mess? The movie is in fast-forward and doesn’t really explain so we get multiple scenes where people are being hyperbolically annoyed and/or angry over the slightest, possibly imaginary, things. I spent well over half the movie wondering why everyone was just so awful to each other when there were no evident causes.
All that’s true except, randomly, Kristen Bell’s character… but only when it comes to her romantic comedy subplot. It’s the best part of the film and isn’t even the premise of the film. In the main plot, she’s awful and vindictive to her sister who seems a genuinely nice person. Except when she’s randomly awful to her brother’s boyfriend who didn’t seem all that awful at all. But, then again, the brother and the boyfriend are perfectly awful to each other in private.
And I get it… this is The People We Hate at the Wedding, not The Darlings We Love to Have at the Wedding. I don’t have a problem with the dysfunctional family dynamic… I have a problem with how poorly the backstories are laid out and how the actors act and react to each other. It was like they were directed to overact their out-of-nowhere anger and to just trust the edit.
Still, I did like enough of the movie… Kristen Bell half the time and Alison Janney in half of her scenes… to kind of like the film. Even though it was a struggle. It’s relatively funny and occasionally sweet and heart-warming enough to give it a mild (a very mild) recommendation.
Score: 76