TITLE: 27 Dresses
STARRING: Katherine Heigl, James Marsden
DIRECTED BY: Anne Fletcher
WRITTEN BY: Aline Brosh McKenna
RATING: 2.2
Do not make the same mistake I did and flip through channels and leave this stupid movie on. The one and only redeeming factor here is that Katherine Heigl is a gorgeous bombshell of an actress and watching her in pretty much anything will yield some enjoyment. In it, she’s a compulsive wedding attender who’s too repressed to reveal her feelings to the man she’s madly in love with. Blah blah blah he ends up falling for her sister, yadda yadda yadda some handsome writer wants to write an article about her.
You and I both know we’re not watching this movie to get surprised by the plot, we watch shit like this for the same reason we have sex in the missionary position - we like going through the motions and we usually end up satisfied. On the other side of the metaphor, formulaic romantic comedies are also like a recipe for ham and cheese sandwiches, the merit of the overall product is entirely dependent on the quality of the ingredients used.
Heigl’s definitely the kind of material lead you want for this kind of movie, but literally every single other character in the movie is so charmless that you sort of hope they die and the movie can move on without them. Her eventual romantic partner (the same guy who played Cyclops in X-Men and sucked at it too) is a poorly written, miscast goof that only exists in the mind of women in a focus group. Her kooky, slutty, alcoholic co-worker is acted, written and directed so carelessly that it almost seem like she’s good friends with a meth-addict homeless woman who nobody has figured out is high all the time.
Worst of all is the ridiculous casting in the role of Heigl’s younger sister. There seems to be an unspoken rule that the casting of a rival in a romantic comedy must now produce a scorned blonde that’s noticeably less attractive than our fair protagonist. Apparently Hollywood thinks audiences are too stupid to figure out who to root for if our protagonist is challenged by a woman of equal beauty and a few redeeming qualities.
It’s hard for me to imagine that somebody watched these dailies and said “It looks like we’ve got what we need!” It shouldn’t take a cast of 300 people to realize that you’re not using good ham, cheese or bread.
- Carlos Dominicis
