Shotgun Wedding: J.Lo and Josh's Lame Adventure

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C

Hollywood is a lumbering beast, slow to adapt to change and still prone to throw tropes at us that have out-lived their best-before date.

An action/rom-com starring Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel, Shotgun Wedding screams turn-of-the-century, when the studio would have held a media junket, blurbed the (very) occasional pandering rave on TV, and opened it in theatres. There, cash-paying patrons would watch, say “meh,” and soon forget they ever saw it.

Instead, it’s streaming on Prime Video, meaning there’s nothing to hold you to watching it to the end, least of all the movie itself.

Okay, there is the movie’s end-credit scene (the entire cast doing a karaoke version of Walk Like an Egyptian), which is more entertaining that anything that happened in the previous 90 minutes.

Billed as “Die Hard at a destination wedding,” Shotgun Wedding introduces us to Darcy (Lopez) and Tom (Duhamel), who are on route to a Philippines island, where they are to be wed in front of friends and family who can all afford to attend. These include Darcy’s multi-millionaire dad (Cheech Marin) and her buff ex-fiance (Lenny Kravitz) who arrives showily by helicopter.

Even before the pirates arrive (we’ll get to them in a bit), the wedding seems snakebit. Tom, an out-of-work minor league ball player, has too much time on his hands, and has turned into a “groomzilla,” micro-managing the event. He’s so engaged in arranging pineapples, he manages to miss his intended doing an erotic striptease on the bed to get his attention.

All of this, and the various tensions between the guests (particularly between Marin’s character and his ex-wife, played by Sonia Braga), is handled with a complete lack of comic dexterity, and practically no commitment by the cast.

The one exception is Jennifer Coolidge, who plays Tom’s mom Carol, making the procedings look like a White Lotus episode that got spiked. Her all-in delivery of dud comic lines proves irrefutably that she is not simply someone who says funny things, but someone who says things funny.

Then there are the pirates, armed with suspiciously obtained intel about the net worth of the guest-list. They’re the kind of noisy, masked brigands who waste a lot of ammunition firing machine guns into the air. They soon arrange to have the guests all stand in the pool – everyone save for the bride-and-groom, who’ve gone off to argue over whether they should call off the wedding.

The rogue couple, who spend much of the movie running and escaping with their hands tied together, clumsily pick off the even-more-clumsy pirates, leading to an unlikely denouement involving the identity of the leaked wedding invite. At no time do Lopez and Duhamel seem to have any chemistry.

There is blood. There’s gunfire and explosions. None of it is particularly well-handled or timed, except for the few seconds when Coolidge has an automatic weapon in her hands. In retrospect, they should have given her a gun in the opening scene and let her let fly.

Ultimately, Shotgun Wedding seems like something from a different time, a time-waster full of tropes that exists to only to fill time with the odd boom and an occasional chuckle – and falls short of even that.

Shotgun Wedding. Directed by Jason Moore. Starring Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel and Lenny Kravitz. Begins streaming on Prime, Friday, January 27.