Mother of the Bride is Meh

Father of the Bride starring Steve Martin and Diane Keaton is one of my favorite movies. Whenever I’m sad or sick, nothing makes me feel better like putting on Father of the Bride and letting the film heal my spirit. When I saw they made a new movie called Mother of the Bride I knew I was going to watch it. However, Mother of the Bride is quite different from what I thought it would be, and almost nothing like Father of the Bride at all. While Father of the Bride is a movie about getting older and the distress a father can go through when watching his daughter marry and leave home, Mother of the Bride is more of a love story. It’s definitely not what you think though.

The film starts with the engagement of Emma (Miranda Cosgrove) and RJ (Sean Teale). The proposal is pretty clunky and at first I wasn’t sure if Emma was excited about the engagement or not. Turns out, she is. After the engagement, Emma’s main concern is telling her mother. Not only has she not told her mom that she’s dating someone, the engagement means that Emma will not be moving home like her mom wanted. 

Emma’s mother, Lana (Brooke Shields), is a very powerful woman. She is in charge of a research lab in a hospital. When her daughter returns home, she expects to hear that Emma will be moving home and starting grad school. However, Emma shares the news that she is starting her own business. She has received a sponsorship from a major travel company for an Instagram account she started and they are paying for the entire wedding to promote one of their resorts. Once Lana is convinced that this is truly what her daughter wants, she happily accepts the choices Emma has made and is excited for her marriage. 

Lana meets RJ when everyone travels to the resort in Thailand for the wedding. Not only does she meet RJ, but she also meets RJ’s family. Surprisingly, Lana has a history with RJ’s family. Not only was she great friends with RJ’s uncles in college, but she had once been in love with RJ’s father, Will (Benjamin Brat). Fate has seemingly brought the two back together again, but Lana is determined to keep her distance; she still harbors bitter feelings about the way their relationship ended. 

Since Emma’s sponsors are taking over the wedding planning, Lana is left with very few Mother-of-the-Bride duties. She spends most of the days leading up to the wedding relaxing with her friend Janice (Rachael Harris) as well as her old college pals. She also happens to meet another handsome doctor from a U.S. hospital at the resort on vacation. Doctor Lucas (Chad Michael Murray) is much younger than Lana, but he shows a great interest in her and her work. Lana is then torn between spending time with the ex-lover she never got closure with or the new handsome stranger. In the midst of this love triangle, Lana also has to be considerate of her daughter’s feelings and the wedding that is getting seemingly out of hand. 

This movie was an interesting one. I’d heard a lot of people talking about it online after the film first released in early May, and not a lot of what I heard was good. I knew the movie wasn’t going to be amazing within the first couple of minutes of the film. Unfortunately, the script is kind of all over the place. At first, I thought we were going to be following Emma through much more of this film since she was the first character we are introduced to. We don’t see much of Emma in the movie though, most of the film follows Lana and there are far fewer scenes between Lana and Emma than there are between Lana and other characters. Lana’s romance is also the major love story of the movie, despite the wedding being between Emma and RJ. Emma and RJ’s romance is barely fleshed out and I often wondered while watching if the two even liked each other. 

The movie also features a supposed love triangle between Lana, Will, and Lucas. I feel like this is less of a love triangle and more of a romance between Will and Lana. Lucas is there, but he doesn’t pose much of a threat to the romance between Lana and Will; he doesn’t seem to even really be an option to Lana, even though she does spend some time with him at the resort.

Most of the bad things about this film can be attributed to a bad script and actors who aren’t giving Oscar worthy performances. There is a lot of good in this movie that goes unrecognized because of the bad critiques. I feel like the film has a lot to say about being true to yourself and your heart. When Emma gets too consumed by her sponsor’s image for the wedding, her mom asks her to consider what she wants and warns her not to lose herself. This lesson applies to Lana as well. Lana must be true to herself and her heart in order to make a decision about Will. There’s a lot of heart in this movie that goes unrecognized, because of how completely unserious it is. 

I feel like this movie is trying to be two different things. It’s trying to be the Father of the Bride type movie where the parents face the challenges of a child getting married, but it also tries to turn the parent into the main character in a rom-com. I don’t think this works well, because it takes away from the importance of the occasion that is bringing everyone together. The wedding gets completely overshadowed by the romance between the parents, even to the point that the personal feelings of the parents are an interruption during their children’s wedding ceremony. 

I’ve proudly made it through most of this movie review without mentioning the fact that if Will and Lana eventually get married, then Emma and RJ will be married to their step sibling. I find that quite weird, and as a viewer, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to want that or not. Personally, I don’t think I do.

I was excited to see Miranda Cosgrove and Chad Michael Murray in another project. Do I think they did amazing in this movie? No, but I did have fun seeing them and I hope they do more . I felt like a kid watching iCarly or A Cinderella Story again, and that was fun. 

I don’t think Jacob would like this movie, and that’s okay. I don’t think it was overly different or fascinating. It was a fun movie, something entertaining to eat up to an hour and a half of the day, but not a necessary watch.