OK, 8 seen out of 11 today. Same problem as before, I've seen the later remakes of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", but not these earlier versions. And maybe as a kid I might have seen "Yankee Doodle Dandy", only I can't really prove it. So I'm only confident about 8 of these, but that brings me up to 97 seen out of 262, up to 37%. Hoping for a few more last-minute surges like this so I can finish over 40%.
THE PLOT: Darcy and Tom gather their families for the ultimate destination wedding but when the entire wedding party is taken hostage the bride and groom must save their loved ones - if they don't kill each other first.
AFTER: I've already started to break down my romance films watched this year into categories, for the end of year wrap-up. It's just never too early. One category will probably be "Movies where the wedding didn't happen, or almost didn't" and this fits right in with that theme. I have to point out, though, that the movie is a bit misnamed, because a "Shotgun Wedding", traditionally has been slang reserved for a case where the bride is pregnant, and/or the groom does not want to get married, so the bride's father has to use a shotgun to ensure that he goes through with it. Am I wrong? Some film production company kind of co-opted the term, because none of those conditions apply in this story. There simply must have been a better title to use - also I didn't see any of the pirates in this film using a shotgun, so that's another strike against it.
(Speaking of shotguns, though, I just started playing "Red Dead Redemption", which is an Old West-themed video game from 10 or 11 years ago, from the same company that made the "Grand Theft Auto" games, which I started re-playing during the pandemic, only I didn't get very far. But last week we saw a used copy of this game in a Gamestop, only it was too busy there to stand in line and buy it, so she got it for me from Amazon for like $14. Well, two sessions in and I can't stop playing it, and YES there are shotguns in the game, also revolvers and knives and lassos, horses and wagons, duels and hidden gold bars. If my blog goes dark for the next week, you'll know what happened to me, I'm back in the old west shooting coyotes and skinning deer. Damn, it's a lot of fun and I'm two sessions in but already about 30% through the game. It's got elements of GTA combined with the giant explorable world of the last 2 "Zelda" games, so I think I'm hooked, I didn't even want to stop playing to eat dinner.)
Anyway, I didn't watch "Shotgun Wedding" under the best conditions, I came home on Friday night and had two beers, which is pretty normal, except these were STRONG beers, one was an Allagash Tripel, and then hours later I kind of fell asleep 30 minutes into this movie. Woke up, rewound back to where I fell asleep, tried again, and fell asleep again. I then slept until NOON and had to finish the movie after that. Now, was it the beer or was it the movie? The movie's got a fair amount of action in it, as you'd expect from a comedy-romance-action hybrid, so let's say it was the beer.
However, I could make a case for the movie putting me to sleep, because it's one of those deals where there's about a 30 minute story in a 90-minute movie, so the characters have to say everything three times, to stretch out the plot to feature-length. There's a point where the two mains have to do something dangerous and they can't agree on HOW to count down to do it, groom TOM wants to count down from 10, and then bride Darcy says, "No, we don't count down from 10, what is this, a rocket launch? We count down from FOUR!" and then Tom disagrees, saying they should count down from THREE, like everyone does, Darcy argues back that when you count down from three, you really GO on four, so really, when you count down from three, you're really counting from four, and this discussion goes on for another two minutes, perhaps, but it's just WAY longer than it needs to be, and really, the whole movie's like this. Other long-winded discussions are over how to not let go of a live grenade, whether to disable a pirate with a net or a bottle of hairspray lit on fire, and most importantly, whether Tom and Darcy should get married in the first place.
Put the Indonesian pirate story on hold for a second, because the real meat of the story is whether these two should get married, and I've seen this already this month, several times. But in a neat gender-swap TOM is the perfectionist here, the "Groom-zilla" who is obsessing over every little element, when DARCY is the one who wanted a very simple wedding, or better yet, just to elope with her pro-baseball player husband. Tom made the problem worse by not listening to Darcy when she expressed her desire for a small wedding, and then made things EVEN WORSE by inviting both of their families to this private island in the Philippines for the elaborate ceremony. But to be fair, Darcy is somewhat responsible, too, for not raising her concerns earlier about the wedding being too extravagant, also turning down the money from her rich father to pay for the wedding, which ensured that this new couple would be in over their heads trying to pay for it. So they've both made mistakes, and finally they hash the whole thing out just before the ceremony, the argument gets a little heated, and the wedding is off.
But wait, because while they were arguing the aforementioned South Pacific pirates take all the wedding guests hostage, and they make them all sit in the swimming pool for some reason while they seek out the bride and groom, who are conveniently elsewhere. Now the first assumption would be, hey, Tom's an MLB player, so he must be famous, and the pirates are going to hold him for ransom because he's an American sports star. Well, that's not the right back-story, there's a different reason for who wants to kidnap them, but they do still want ransom from Darcy's rich father. No spoilers here, part of the fun is figuring out who's really the villain here.
The rest of the fun comes from watching Darcy and Tom have to transform themselves into warriors to take down the pirates, one by one, and then overcome their fears, obstacles and lack of true fighting skills to find a way to either call for help, or rescue the hostages on their own and maybe take some of the main pirate gang out of the picture. It really shouldn't be possible for two normal people to become Rambo-level soldiers in a matter of hours, but hey, come on, it's a movie, just not a very believable one.
The family members are probably the best part of the movie, this was a huge missed opportunity, when you cast people like Jennifer Coolidge and Cheech Marin and then for the vast majority of the movie, they're not DOING anything, just sitting in a swimming pool. What a waste, and I wonder how many actors spent a week of their life sitting in water up to their necks and ended up questioning their choice to be in this movie. That could not have been comfortable for them - but hey, it could have been worse, originally Armie Hammer was supposed to be the male lead, only he got cancelled and his role when to Josh Duhamel, who I think did a much better job in the role than Hammer ever could have.
Also starring Josh Duhamel (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Lenny Kravitz (last seen in "Count Me In"), Jennifer Coolidge (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Sonia Braga (last seen in "The Jesus Rolls"), Cheech Marin (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Steve Coulter (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), D'Arcy Carden (last seen in "The People We Hate at the Wedding"), Callie Hernandez (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Desmin Borges (last seen in "Carrie Pilby"), Selena Tan (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Alberto Isaac, Melissa Hunter, Pancho Cardena (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Alex Mallari Jr. (last seen in "The Adam Project"), Tharoth Sam, Worapojd Thautanon, Zachary Wood, Vladimir Acevedo, Powpong Kopholrat, Hector Anibal (last seen in "The Lost City"), Asia Munma, Ray Raymundo, Iana Ramirez, Vlad Sosa, Maria del Mar Fernandez Gonzalez, Jose Mota Prestol, Joey Ciotti
RATING: 5 out of 10 weird-looking cocktail napkins (what a poor editing job, I had to freeze-frame to see those napkins, why cut away after a nano-second from a sight gag that you've been building up to?)
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