Mar­ry Me

In Kat Coiro’s Mar­ry Me, jack-of-all-trades Jen­nifer Lopez finds her­self repris­ing the role she’s always been strongest in – that of a beau­ti­ful celebri­ty earnest­ly pulled between look­ing for love and stag­ing her next big stunt.

Kat Valdez (Jen­nifer Lopez) is one of the biggest pop stars on the plan­et, and is all set to mar­ry Bastien (stilt­ed­ly played by Colom­bian pops tar Maluma). The pro­pos­al is set to be streamed in front of a world­wide audi­ence of 20 mil­lion peo­ple, on stage and at the final stop of their tour.

To the out­side, their rela­tion­ship is per­fect – as Bastien makes sure to adver­tise on Insta­gram – but, in the mid­dle of their show, after Kat per­forms a gospel-pop num­ber in a Jesus cross leo­tard sur­round­ed by dancers in Nun PVC body­suits, Page Six releas­es footage show­ing that her betrothed has been hav­ing an affair.

Decked out in a Zuhair Murad wed­ding gown, Kat gets back on stage to a sea of fans with phones at the ready, all await­ing her reac­tion. Its then that she spots quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Nor­mal Man Char­lie Gilbert (Owen Wil­son), a maths teacher dragged along to the con­cert by his friend and col­league Park­er (Sarah Sil­ver­man), in an effort to make him cool­er to his pre-teen daugh­ter Lou (Chloe Coleman).

Kat calls Char­lie up on stage to mar­ry her, and Char­lie com­plies, real­is­ing she’s hav­ing a melt­down and kind­ly decid­ing not to make her life any more dif­fi­cult. And so, now mar­ried as com­plete strangers, the tried and true for­mu­la of oppo­sites-attract-just-go-with-it rom-com ensues.

Mar­ry Me is refresh­ing in its refusal to pre­tend to be any­thing oth­er than a fluffy star vehi­cle, and one that has us remem­ber why we fell over our­selves for Jen­nifer Lopez and Owen Wil­son in the first place. Though their roman­tic chem­istry is uncon­vinc­ing, they shine in their indi­vid­ual seg­ments, when Kat is being fussed over by her team or onstage and Char­lie is walk­ing his con­sti­pat­ed bull­dog Tank or coach­ing the ​“Math­letes”.

When you relax in to the absurd ini­tial premise (based on a graph­ic nov­el by the way), the most jar­ring parts of the film become the exces­sive spon-con. In a time when the real­i­ty of celebri­ty is so grim­ly acces­si­ble and as utter­ly un-fab­u­lous as it’s ever been, direc­tor Coiro has no choice but to include the end­less spon­sor­ships and Insta­gram posts we’re sub­ject­ed to out­side of the cin­e­ma. A gen­er­ous read­ing might be that this is some kind of inci­sive meta com­men­tary, but the film is too sweet for that.

And so Mar­ry Me checks the box­es you’d expect it to when you buy a tick­et to see Jen­nifer Lopez as a roman­tic lead. It’s nice to see her occa­sion­al­ly speak­ing Span­ish and no longer bank­ing on the racial ambi­gu­i­ty that made her so suc­cess­ful in the ear­ly 2000s. In fact, that’s one of the over­all strengths of the film, as Coiro – to vary­ing degrees of suc­cess – cher­ryp­icked the parts of the genre that work and left the bits that make you wince on the cut­ting room floor.

Whether that be an eye-rolling overem­pha­sis on rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Netflix’s meme-ready rom-com offer­ings of late (that are almost always bar­ren of star pow­er in favour of box tick­ing), or the pletho­ra of pho­bias that plagues the films of yes­ter­year and made Lopez and Wil­son the stars they are. Whether you laugh with or at Mar­ry Me, the odds are you will laugh. So that’s a win.

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