MOTHER OF THE BRIDE - Mark Reviews Movies

Mother of the Bride, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 9, 2024

There's not a single original idea in Mother of the Bride, which starts to look more like a hotel advertisement than an actual movie. Sure, it's a lovely place, like pretty much any expensive international resort, where the whole point is feel perfectly comfortable and get a vague taste of the local culture. Actually, this movie is a lot like that, in that it's perfectly comfortable doing the same things romantic comedies have been doing for years and only occasionally remembering that it could have a more specific story to tell.

Early on, most of the specifics, strangely, serve as excuses to get the characters to the resort, located in Thailand's island province of Phuket. Two young lovebirds, Emma (Miranda Cosgrove) and RJ (Sean Teale), become engaged at an exclusive restaurant in London, sending her back to a prestigious university in the United States to tell her mother the good news. Emma's worried, of course, because Lana (Brooke Shields), the mother, is a successful geneticist, apparently working on a cure for cancer (It can wait, one supposes, for an all-expenses paid trip at the last minute), and a bit of a controlling presence.

The point is that all of these characters are wealthy. There's Lana's job, of course, but RJ also works for a company that does marketing for the resort. He met Emma because of an internship she took with the firm after college, and in perhaps the most outlandish explanation for why she has a lot of money, we learn that she just got a sizeable sponsorship from the company for her role as a social media influencer.

One can almost feel screenwriter Robin Bernheim Burger bending over backwards to somehow make that point work, as Emma explains how she started the online account in high school but let it slip while studying at college. For some reason, this multi-million-dollar company has decided to invest a lot of money into what's essentially Emma's forgotten hobby, because the movie presumably would have to be set in a less-photogenic location otherwise.

Like the movie itself, forget Emma and the convoluted rationale for how she ends up having a free wedding at a luxury resort, managed by the company's top PR person (played by Tasneem Roc), and with fashion provided gratis by the world's top designers. Seriously, though, how incredible were Emma's marketing tactics and social media presence as a high schooler for the story's own setup to be slightly believable?

Instead, most of the labored plotting revolves around Lana and RJ's father. Since Emma is scared of her judgmental mother, Lana only meets her future son-in-law for the first time at the resort, leading to the realization that his dad Will (Benjamin Bratt) is her college ex. The two had their own passionate romance decades ago, but it ended suddenly, badly, and with a lot of unanswered questions for both of them.

This unlikely (which apparently is an unintentional running theme for the whole movie) but thorny situation could be handled in a few ways: with sensitivity and maturity for lost love, with the old standby of two charming actors bantering and bickering their way through barbed insults, or with maybe an optimistic tale of fated romance. Here, Lana and Will almost immediately wrestle over her bag, resulting in both of them falling into a pond. At least the filmmakers let us know they barely have any ideas to run out of within the first ten minutes or so.

Some of the other gags include Lana walking in on a nude Will after he gets out of the shower (For some reason, he thinks he has invited his brother into the room, which raises a couple of questions about Will's hearing and why he'd walk stark naked into a room when he knows someone is there), Lana's perpetually horny sister Janice (Rachael Harris) saying everything one would expect her to say from that description, and, likely, a lot of other completely forgettable jokes that, well, have been forgotten before the writing of this review. Lana and Will do fall into another pool of water, though, which is only memorable because the repetition of the bit is as predictable as the first instance of it.

All of this is mostly lazy, from the jokes to the obligatory complications and misunderstandings that make up the "plot" (A character overhears a phone call that sounds romantic, but surprise, it was far from it). On the other hand, Shields and Bratt are charming enough that it's not a total waste, but apart from them, Mother of the Bride comes annoyingly close to being one.

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