The new gay wedding comedy Kiss the Bride (opening in limited release Friday) begins with an oddly appropriate image: while watching two male models fake kissy-face for his magazine’s “gay wedding” issue, Matthew (Philipp Karner) gets smacked in the face with a gob of wedding cake.
After seeing Kiss the Bride, the idea of being hit in the face with an overly sweet but otherwise tasteless wedding-related concoction is all too familiar.
A passable but slapdash trifle that’s a bit too light on both romance and comedy for its genre, “Bride” tells the story of Matthew, a Los Angeles gay magazine editor who is drawn back to his sleepy hometown after learning that his first love, Ryan (James O’Shea) is getting married to – GASP – a woman. Determined to right this potential wrong despite not having had contact with his former boyfriend for ten years, Matthew shows up on Ryan’s doorstep, crashes the bridal shower, and proceeds to foul up everything for everyone involved.
Okay, quick poll: raise your hand if you messed around with someone during puberty who is now happily married with kids. Okay, you can all put your hands down. Now, raise your hands again if you even remotely considered crashing their wedding because you felt that the groom-to-be should be with you instead because of some awkward fumblings you had under the Garfield sheets back when you had to take out your retainer for the fun stuff.
Exactly.
Well, that’s the story here. If it all sounds a bit like Chuck & Buck with a bachelor party … it kind of is. Only Buck had the sense to cast the emotionally stunted character as the antagonist and played the situation straight, to wonderfully unsettling effect. Here, the attempts to make Matthew anything other than the self-obsessed borderline stalker that he is aren't nearly as funny as they were meant to be.
True, the inspiration for Kiss the Bride wasn’t Chuck & Buck, which is a decidedly darker (and far more effective) film. The inspiration for this film was My Best Friend’s Wedding … and if you aren’t quick enough to pick up on it yourself, don’t worry: the connections are actually mentioned by the characters as the all-too-familiar story progresses.
We’ve got the rather loathsome lead character (Julia 2.0), the bitchy gay friend (here a caustic lesbian played by Jane Cho, not Rupert Everett), the ditzy-but-OMG-too-lovable-to-hate bride-to-be (Tori Spelling sitting in for Cameron Diaz), the lunky-but-endearing, utterly clueless groom, and a smattering of goofy types thrown into the wedding party to distract you from the fact that the movie’s central conceit (a selfish person trying to BREAK UP A WEDDING, for heaven’s sake) is misanthropic to the extreme.
Philipp Karner, James O'Shea
With My Best Friend’s Wedding, they actually met the challenge of making the essentially unlikable lead character watchable, mostly because the film balanced her venom with some legitimately funny gags and inspired, scene-stealing performances from Diaz and Everett. In Bride, none of the supporting characters is sparkling enough to distract the audience from the plot’s shortcomings, and the whole exercise winds up feeling whiny, shallow, and mean.
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