Marry Me – Film Review

Pop superstar Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez) is about to get married before an audience of her loyal fans. However, seconds before the ceremony, she learns about her fiance’s cheating ways and has a meltdown on stage. In a moment of inspired insanity, Kat locks eyes with a total stranger in the crowd named Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson) and marries him on the spot. As forces conspire to separate the unlikely newlyweds, they must soon decide if two people from such different worlds can find true love together.

Kat Coiro‘s first film in nine years is Marry Me, a movie where a huge pop sensation decides to marry a random fan. Why did Coiro decide to make this her comeback film? Nobody really knows the answer except for Coiro, and I can only speculate because there are extremely few saving graces in Marry Me, a film that is far too goofy and over-the-top with its cheesy story. What could’ve been a sweet and heartwarming story turned out to be a hugely forgettable one and one that feels far too long.

With a running time of almost two hours, you’d think that the screenwriters must’ve taken their sweet time to craft a story that feels greatly developed. Perhaps the characters have interesting backstories or maybe the writers wanted to give each one a meaningful character arc. Nope. It’s just long for the sake of being long. The film is absolutely crammed with annoying musical sequences that go on for far too long, and it was immediately apparent to me that these scenes were only in the film to make a soundtrack album for Jennifer Lopez.

The scenes where she’s on stage singing are just boring. I get it – the character Kat Valdez is a pop singer in the movie, so it would make sense to have a scene or two of her on-stage singing to get the point across. But that doesn’t mean there has to be about five or six scenes like this. It just gets incredibly tedious rather quickly. I actually found myself exhaling a sigh of boredom every time these moments happened.

The story does have a few moments of genuine joy along the way. I’d be lying if I said that there weren’t a handful of scenes that made me smile, but they are so few and far between that I can’t recommend this movie by saying it’s charming and heartwarming because the vast majority of the film just isn’t. Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson deliver decent performances in the film, but I honestly didn’t feel even a shred of chemistry between the two here.

In almost every scene they feel so awkward acting around each other. In order for this movie to fully work for you, you’re going to have to feel like these two are a believable couple, and I couldn’t believe that for even one second.

And it may be a small gripe, but it is still something that bothered me. Game of Thrones actor John Bradley is in this movie and he ends up delivering a charismatic performance here in the role of Collin Calloway. The only problem is that Owen Wilson’s character Charlie directly mentions Game of Thrones in the film. This wouldn’t be an issue if Bradley was portraying a fictionalized version of himself, but he isn’t. He’s portraying a guy named Collin. So how can Game of Thrones even exist in this movie’s universe when one of the actors from said show is in this movie portraying a man named Collin? It’s incredibly muddled and confusing and this whole thing could’ve been avoided had the screenwriters removed that one line.

But really, the screenwriters should’ve gone back to the writing room more than once because Marry Me is an incredibly predictable and forgettable rom-com that you won’t want to say “yes” to.