Shotgun Wedding Parent Guide

Darcy (Jennifer Lopez) and Tom (Josh Duhamel) are a day away from getting married at a lavish private island in the Philippines when they both start to get cold feet. To make thing worse, their ceremony is hijacked by pirates and their families and friends are taken hostage. Desperate to rescue their loved ones, Darcy and Tom set out to save their wedding - and their relationship.

I’ve noticed a trend lately of movies that seem to have been made just to spawn a fun trailer. The trailer has a few great laughs and some fun action, so you expect the film to be the same, but as the runtime ticks on you realize you’ve already seen all the good parts. That’s what Shotgun Wedding is. I do recommend the trailer, but once you’ve seen that there’s no need to waste the extra 98 minutes.

That’s not to say this film is completely bad: there just isn’t enough good stuff to fill the time. The cast is superb, and they do a lot of heavy lifting with a mediocre script. I don’t think Jennifer Lopez is a particularly good actress at the best of times, but her charisma and charm are palpable in every frame, greatly elevating the watchability of this movie. It probably goes without saying, but Jennifer Coolidge is an absolute delight, and I would have happily watched her read the phonebook for an hour rather than this incoherent mess of a story. She gets the only good laughs in the whole production, which makes me wonder if she was going off script.

Outside of the bright spots in the cast, the film can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a serious action flick or a zany comedy. And so, it fails at both. It is neither fun nor funny, and the level of violence makes it hard to imagine that the writers were going for a lighthearted romp. If the creators had really leaned into the comedy and camp, this could have been a homerun, but instead they took themselves far too seriously, resulting in a tonal mess.

With the high levels of violence and language, Shotgun Wedding is not an appropriate choice for most audiences. I would say that Jennifer Coolidge fans could just skip around and only watch the scenes she’s in and have a great time, but I can’t imagine anyone else being able to say the same. This is not a film to which I would say “I do”.