Netflix’s quest to release a crappy rom-com for every minor holiday continues with Mother of the Bride, which guarantees this Mother’s Day will be completely forgettable. Note, it isn’t explicitly about Mother’s Day, but rather, is about a mother-daughter relationship that’s strained by a monumentally familiar assemblage of rom-com cliches. Which isn’t to say that it fails in the talent department – the cast is led by Brooke Shields, Benjamin Bratt and Miranda Cosgrove, and it’s directed by Mark Waters, a veteran filmmaker who’d probably prefer we remember The House of Yes and Mean Girls instead of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past or Bad Santa 2. And once his latest inevitably hits the Netflix Top 10 for a few days and then drops out of sight, he’ll probably still prefer to be remembered for The House of Yes and Mean Girls.
The Gist: RJ (Sean Teale) leads Emma (Cosgrove) into a curiously empty restaurant, only to turn up the lights and reveal a towering flower arrangement that the Queen of England would find a bit too gauche. Only the best backdrop for his proposal to his one and only: he gets down on one knee and she says yes and then immediately frets about sharing the joyous news with her mother. Why? She didn’t bother to tell Mom that she was dating somebody while she was in London interning for a resort company that just offered her a six-figure social-media sponsorship deal. Cut to: San Francisco, where Emma surprises her mom at work. Lana (Shields) is a superstar in genetic research, and surely a highly accomplished, intelligent and confident person, so it’ll be EXTRA FUNNY when she eventually starts acting all neurotic and tripping over things and falling into pools and such. Oh, the irony. So rich, so hilarious. Better wrap yourself in a corset so your sides don’t burst from all the laughter.
What, you ask, could force such an extraordinary woman off the rails? A tortured movie plot, that’s what. A tortured movie plot that plops everyone in a lush resort in Phuket, Thailand, because no one in their right goddamn mind would bother to watch a wedding rom-com that’s set in Hoboken or Kalamazoo. That’s an annoying cliche, but it’s not the most tortured part. No, that would be the positively mind-blowing COINKYDINK that Emma’s soon-to-be father-in-law, Will (Bratt), dated Lana back in college. Emphasis on the DINK, because he done R-U-N-N-O-F-T without a word of warning, and busted her heart to pieces. Decades have passed and now here they are, in Phuket, feeling all awkward and gutting it out for the sake of their beloved children. What are the chances? THE LORD WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS.
And so the tests of Lana’s fortitude begin, because not only does she have to deal with a bunch of old moldy feelings from decades ago, but she also learns her role in the wedding is significantly diminished since it’s a literal Instagram wedding sponsored and organized by Emma’s employer. So the usual question we wrestle with while watching these destination-wedding rom-coms, namely, who the hell is paying for all this, has an answer for once. Lana looks at the agenda and she’s a literal asterisk on the page. I mean, they even write Lana’s reception speech for her. And since she has little to do as people shuttle Emma here and there for photo shoots and product plugs – all the stuff of a dream wedding! – Lana lounges in spas and by pools with her wisecrack factory of a sister Janice (Rachael Harris), and, of course, accidentally walks in on Will and his sculpted abdominals while he’s showering. Oopsie!
The primary conflict here is how Lana will handle these significant blows to her self-esteem. And the answer to that is, poorly. So poorly, our protag becomes a loathsome idiot who says she’s enduring all this humiliation for the sake of her daughter’s happiness, but is actually making everything about herself. She banters and snipes like a jilted teenager. She gets so competitive, she ends up drilling a pickleball into Will’s testicles, leaving it up for debate whether it was an accident or not (cue Janice: “Game, set, ouch!”). But she and her amiable ex eventually get less frosty, and soon she finds herself stuck in a half-assed love triangle with Perpetually Shirtless Will and the Also Perpetually Shirtless Lucas (Chad Michael Murray), a hunky vacationing doctor. Will any of these people ever act like adults? Spoiler alert: Absolutely not!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Note, this movie has nothing to do with Father of the Bride and its slew of remakes and sequels and sequels to the remakes. It does boast a plot that may inspire the writers of Ticket to Paradise to call their copyright lawyers. It also brought to mind You Again, a similarly detestable slab of idiocy in which people also fall into pools, specifically, Jamie Lee Curtis and Sigourney Weaver in the midst of a slapfight. It is a horror. Please note that You Again is not a movie I ever want to recall for any reason. I don’t take kindly to being forced to remember You Again. You do not want me drawing comparison to You Again, because that’s when things get mean and ugly.
Performance Worth Watching: This material – which needs to be chopped up and fed to the worms ASAP – does the cast zero favors. Shields can be an agreeable lead in lightweight comedies, but she’s forced into an ill-fitting quasi-character who comes off more shrill and self-centered than as a supportive, selfless mom. It’s like the director backed her into a corner and forced her to constantly scrunch up her face. Makes you want to retitle this one Brooke Shields’ Scrunched-up Face: The Movie.
Memorable Dialogue: Emma drops this doozy when she learns that her mom and Will used to be A Thing: “If RJ is my half-brother, then the wedding is off!” she quips, proving that rom-coms and incest jokes go together like ice cream and botulism.
Sex and Skin: Bratt holding a pillow over his nethers, but that’s it. Not even a butt shot.
Our Take: The Script-o-Matic has churned out more Hallmarkish drivel that sets up a potentially lucrative examination of complex mother-daughter relationships, then ignores it in lieu of groin-based comedy and wincingly terrible scenes in which Shields flops around in an ill-fitting dress or delivers a decrepit groaner like “I have underwear older than him” when a younger gent shows some romantic interest. At least there are no animal gags in this one, because usually in destination-wedding rom-coms set in tropical locales, inevitably someone gets shit on by seagulls or humped by dolphins or stung by a jellyfish, therefore prompting one character to pee on another character. Honestly, I was hoping this particular collection of twits would’ve encountered a bask of ravenous crocodiles so everyone could meet their gory end, but then reconsidered the fantasy upon realizing that the utter indigestibility of these characters would have killed the poor creatures.
Where was I? Right – Emma and Lana’s poorly realized relationship. Lana’s grin-and-bear-it attempts to be a supportive mother even though her daughter is handing her wedding over to a corporate entity (the film borders on being a glossy advertisement for a resort company that shall remain unnamed in this review, thanks) and marrying the son of the son-of-a-bitch who left her heart in tatters? There’s a little something to that dynamic, but this movie is empty and gutless, uninterested in anything beyond a plot full of dopey misunderstandings, klutzy slapstick, wearisome dialogue and shirtless hunks. We’ve seen and heard every moment of Mother of the Bride before, and you really don’t need to see and hear them again, especially when they’re executed so lifelessly.
Our Call: SKIP IT and SKIP IT hard. Anyone But You is a destination-wedding rom-com that’s also on Netflix. Watch that one instead. It’s funny where Mother of the Bride is inane: all the way down to its bones.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
