Shotgun Wedding, directed by Jason Moore, is a romcom starring Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel. My expectations for this movie were pretty average, just an inoffensive, sometimes funny and sometimes sweet, movie. I was apparently giving this movie too much credit though. This was one of the most soulless, humorless, and un-endearing things I’ve ever watched.
This is the first live-action movie I’ve ever seen with Jennifer Lopez, and while I’ll never completely write someone off after one performance, it’s going to be hard for me to view her in a positive light after how terrible she was here. The writing for her character was bad, yes, but that’s the case for everyone in the movie.
She somehow exacerbated what was already terrible with her horrific acting. Josh Duhamel is borderline unbearable for a majority of this movie, but he’s a godsend on the screen next to her. I’m just hoping she phoned this in on purpose so I’m not being so harsh to someone that actually tried.
Some of the side characters did what they could in terms of acting, but the material they had to work with was too bad for it to matter. Jennifer Coolidge was the only one with some moderately funny moments, but they never warranted more than a sharp exhale rather than any form of actual laughter.
I’m a D’arcy Carden fan and she was fine, but she was one of the worst written characters in the film so she didn’t have a chance no matter what.
Final Thoughts
The story of Shotgun Wedding was boring and predictable, at no point was I engaged enough to care about what’s happening next. None of the kills were entertaining, unique, or creative, which is truly unfortunate because that could have made it at least a little bit fun. The cinematography was bad, even for a studio romcom where the bar is lower than probably any other genre. There were some weird cuts and editing choices. Just run down the list on the aspects of filmmaking and this movie fails the test, and in unspectacular fashion too. This is not one of those “so bad it’s good” movies, it’s just so bad.
