The Wedding Date

Directed by Clare Kilner, The Wedding Date follows Debra Messing’s Kat Ellis as she hires a male escort (Dermot Mulroney’s Nick Mercer) to accompany her to her sister’s (Amy Adams’ Amy) wedding in London. It’s a decent-enough premise that’s employed to tedious and frustratingly half-baked effect by Kilner, as the filmmaker, working from Dana Fox’s screenplay, delivers a sluggish romantic comedy that suffers from an almost total lack of chemistry between its two leads – with Kat and Nick’s lack of heat compounded by the head-scratchingly combative bent of their various conversations and encounters. (Why, for example, does Nick immediately take such an antagonistic approach to his dealings with Kat, particularly given that she’s paying him a hefty sum for his lackluster services?) It’s clear, too, that the arms-length atmosphere persists through a hopelessly uninvolving midsection focused on the far-from-engrossing exploits of several dull periphery figures, and although the movie admittedly does pick up with a final third that leans hard on the genre’s conventions, including the race to a loved one and a fake break-up, The Wedding Date, despite its mercifully brief running time, has long-since confirmed its place as a romcom that doesn’t, for the most part, work as either a romance or a comedy.

** out of ****