License to Wed
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Movie Reviews of License to Wed
Movie Review: It was ok
Summary: 3 Stars
Robin Williams was not funny, but instead annoying. There were a few funny scenes however, involving plastic babies. I would reccomend renting it, but by no means, do not waste your money purchasing it.Movie Review: Personal Message to Robin Williams - You Need a Better Agent!
Summary: 2 Stars
Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) and Ben Murphy (John Krasinski, TV's "The Office") meet cute at a Starbucks and start dating. A vignette of cute scenes shows the progress of their relationship. Then, at her parents (Peter Strauss and Roxanne Hart) 30th Anniversary party, Ben stands up and proposes to Sadie. She immediately agrees and everyone is ecstatic. Ben tells her he was thinking of a ceremony in the Caribbean, but she has always had a dream to get married in St. Augustine's, the family church, in a ceremony presided over by Reverend Frank (Robin Williams). They meet with Reverend Frank and his young protégé (Josh Flitter, an 11 year old who has already appeared in a number of films) who reveals the church has an opening in two years. After a little more research, Frank finds they had a cancellation for three weeks from today. Excited, Ben and Sadie agree and Reverend Frank tells them they must complete his marriage preparation course before he will marry them at St. Augustines. Sadie seems completely unaware of some of the strange `tests' Frank puts Ben through, but Ben pushes through like a good little soldier; he is in love with Sadie and will do whatever it takes. Will Ben and Sadie be able to handle the pressures of an upcoming wedding and the madness Reverend Frank subjects them to?
"License to Wed", directed by Ken Kwapis, who has had a troubled film career and more success in television (he most recently directed some episodes of "The Office"), starts with an interesting, if unoriginal and overly sitcom idea and doesn't really follow through with it.
Robin Williams is slightly low-key as Reverend Frank. The rapid fire, stream of consciousness, pop-culture reference filled monologues he has become famous for are not in evidence in this film. That's a good and a bad thing.
As the Reverend, he is interested in preserving the sanctity of marriage, so he puts Sadie and her fiancé, Ben, through his popular Marriage Training program. Basically, he subjects them to a series of challenges (abuses?), some of which are amusing for about a half second, then quickly become tiring. But the main question that isn't answered is: Why? Why does Reverend Frank subject Sadie, and particularly Ben to these challenges (abuses!) which really don't instruct or teach? In fact, Reverend Frank seems to be jealous of Ben. This is more than a little creepy. Frank is both a reverend and about thirty years older than Sadie, both of which make this idea more than a little nauseating.
So, if Frank isn't jealous, what is his excuse? In one scene, he decides to have a little game of catch with Ben and they start tossing a ball around in the auditorium of the school. Then, Frank beans Ben in the face, causing his nose to become bloody. I know, I know. Funny stuff.
But Williams does manage to make the role a little amusing, more amusing than it has a right to be. William's makes Frank seem like a little devil in disguise. He sits in a surveillance van with his little protégé and they spy on the new couple. A couple of times, his reactions to their comments are cute and amusing.
But without William's trademark riffs, the role seems too low key for Williams and becomes more of a generic role any comedian could handle. But because the role is low-key, it allows Williams the opportunity to play a more realistic character. Too bad the character isn't more interesting. So Williams seems damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
Mandy Moore's Sadie is pretty but boring. Sadie's basic purpose is to go along with Reverend Frank, so Ben has no choice but to submit to his abuse. Really, the movie is about Frank torturing Ben, so Sadie must remain blissfully unaware throughout the film. Yawn.
Moore has never been an exciting actress. She is always simply playing a character, reading the lines as memorized. When you watch a good, or great, actor there are other things going on as they try to bring life to the character.
I really like John Krasinski on "The Office". He plays Jim, the likable prankster on this popular TV show. In "License", he is basically a likable guy, but he merely reacts to Frank's shenanigans throughout. The role is more believable because we believe he is in love with Sadie and will do whatever it takes to keep the relationship going.
Josh Flitter plays Frank's little protégé, a 10 or 11-year-old little boy who follows the Reverend around everywhere. Once again, creepy. Why anyone would let their son hang around anyone all the time, let alone a Reverend. He adds zilch to the story except to give Williams someone to react to when they are sitting alone, in a surveillance van. Creepy. Have I said that already? And he isn't funny.
"License" works very hard to set-up a number of situations, quote unquote funny situations, for Ben and Sadie to deal with. They go to a group class, where the rest of Frank's victims, ...er, students, are already deep into their marriage course. Frank, of course, tries to get Ben and Sadie to fight. But this leads to another character knocking down a table of snacks and yelling "5 second rule". If this is the type of quote unquote funny thing you like to watch, then "License" has more of it in store for you.
I mentioned earlier that Frank subjects his victims to a series of group exercises. Actually, we are the victims, the people who spend money to see this film.
At the end of the film, they show a series of bloopers, including Williams, Krasinski and the supporting cast breaking up and making each other laugh. I want to see the movie they were making when these bloopers happened. I really doubt they were working on "License to Wed" when they occurred.
Movie Review: THE WHOLE IS LESS THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
Summary: 2 Stars
As earlier reviewers here have correctly noted, the grandfather of LICENSE TO WED is the 1930s - 1940s type of screwball comedy. Here, though, instead of a prior betrothal to a Ralph Bellamy-style nobody, an anti-fraternization policy in the workplace, or some other calamity like being drafted into the armed services, the comedic block here is a Roman Catholic priest, played to the hilt by Robin Williams in his patented gonzo style. It's a witty characterization with witty lines, and I doubt many actors of his generationcould pull off the trick of seeming charmingly reassuring yet hopelessly rigid so well. The two aspects of this personality almost came off consistently; and given the general mess that LICENSE TO WED is, he struggled valiantly with his character. That is not the same as saying that it worked.
That's only the beginning of the trouble in this flaccid movie, because Robin Williams as Roman Catholic priest does not clash realistically (or entertainingly) with his comedic antagonists, a hapless upper-middle-class couple whose trouble begins when the bride-to-be insists on being married in her family's traditional church. (Ironically, the script observes, none of the family members had actually been to a church service there in more than ten years, and they remembered the Robin Williams character warmly, but only vaguely.)
It so happens that the comedic couple had actually been living together for some time, and thought that marriage planning would consist simply of arranging the logistics and brushing up on marriage rituals. But then they run into the immovable priest (Williams), who insists they take his (accelerated) marriage-preparation classes to qualify for a marriage ceremony in "his" church. The two halves of this movie -- the priest versus his initiates -- just don't play off each other; and we the audience are more likely to feel, if we feel anything at all, a little pity for the couple instead of being entertained or enlightened. Despite our couple's history of sharing an apartment and a bed, the priest orders those poor souls to remain celibate AND chaste for the three weeks until the actual wedding service can take place. (IMHO any couple who loved each other so much without qualm, and had been living together so successfully, would have told the priest that even if THEY went to Hell, they'd probably see him there first!)
Things get pretty weird when we get farther into this story and the plotworks are obliged to thicken. In an attempt to rev things up, the priest shows an absolute delight in raising the barre for marriage qualification higher and higher. I confess I don't really know whether he intended to frustrate them out of their engagement, or if he's simply on a power trip in which he holds his interpretations (or OPINIONS) of church dogma as superior to the actual well-being and instruction of the nervous couple.
Or maybe it was just plain meanness. The only really fresh plot device in this film is in stunningly bad taste: trying to find humor in the character of an intermediary, an annoyingly supercilious ten-year-old boy enrolled in some kind of weird cleric-of-the-future program and at the priest's beck and call. ***ONE SPOILER*** One instance of this "fun" is when the boy breaks into the couple-to-be's apartment and plants an electronic bug inside the bedroom lampshade, just to eavesdrop on any unwitting pillow talk!****
***MINI-RANT***: Along with the overall muddle and slack, there is one enormous and inexcusable deviation from reality in LICENSE TO WED. Despite having been vetted by three writers and twice as many production staff, the script uses terms to refer to or about Williams' post that are consistently, and absolutely, wrong. There is no doubt that his character is anything other than that of a Roman Catholic churchman. Yet we the audience NEVER hear the terms "Father," "Priest," or even "Padre." Instead, we consistently hear him addressed as "Reverend" and his position as "Minister." This simply is not the case. With all the multi-millions Hollywood movies cost these days, could they not, for realism's sake, have engaged for a day or two the services of an actual Catholic priest as technical consultant?? Only Protestant Christians use the terms "Reverend," "The Reverend," or "Minister," and not every single denomination at that. Certainly the Robin Williams character would never have tolerated such misnomers, and more to the point, even a family full of highly lapsed Catholics would recognize that such Protestant terminology is wrong. This is a core blunder, not a relatively minor semantic scruple like confusing "Episcopal" (for things Episcopal) with "Episcopalian" (for people, and only people, Episcopal).****
IMHO everyone should stay away from this mess. Please feel free to spend the eight bucks on another movie (at the time of this writing, practically everything else) or a better DVD. Or give the money to a charity or a church, as is your right as an American. But please do not subject yourself to the IQ-draining goop that is so much of LICENSE TO WED. Promising writing, sound casting, and an intermittently witty script did not a movie make.
Movie Review: License to Wed Movie Review from MoviePulse.net
Summary: 2 Stars
Mandy Moore hears wedding bells yet again, and just like her previous, teen-oriented romantic comedies, License to Wed will send you running from the altar. However, unlike her last disastrous headliner Because I Said So, there is one redeeming quality that will make this film moderately enjoyably for audiences and that is the presence of the wonderful Robin Williams.
Sadie (Moore) and Ben (John Krasinski) are ready to tie the knot, but the bride-to-be has just one condition - she wants to be married in the same church she attended growing up. Having wanted to be married in a tropical destination, Ben begrudgingly agrees. With little to no availability, the popular, yet highly unorthodox Reverend Frank agrees to squeeze the couple in, but on one condition, they complete his three month marriage preparation course in a hurried three weeks.
The course, which is designed to bring out future marital problems in order to test how the couple will deal with the stress before committing their lives to each other, quickly starts to drive Ben up the wall. Reverend Frank and his partner in crime, a rather stumpy youth partaking in a ministers of tomorrow program, seem to be everywhere, giving the couple little to no intimate privacy. Feeling like he is losing touch with his fiancé, Ben follows the advice of his friend, and rather than concentrating on passing the course, he tries to find a crack in Reverend Frank's armor hoping that it will get him and Sadie out of the course and back on track with their lives.
With License to Wed, plausibility completely goes out the window. Rather than saving Reverend Frank's more unorthodox methods for later in the film, the screenplay throws Ben and Sadie into outrageous scenarios right away. A good comedy should simmer to a boil, saving the best and most outrageous jokes for last, but director Ken Kwapis seems to feel that Robin Williams' presence alone should justify throwing this natural form of comedic storytelling out the window, causing the film to only work in slight spurts.
For such a poorly constructed screenplay it is a credit to the actors' talents that they can make the film as humorous as it is. While most of the jokes will have you rolling your eyes, there are a few moments when Robin Williams and The Office star John Krasinski will make you genuinely chuckle. Searching for skeletons in Reverend Frank's closet, Ben breaks into the pastor's home while Williams' character is showering. As Ben tiptoes across the living room, audiences gasped in horror as they heard Williams' booming voice shout "STOP". When the comedian finished the sentence in a sing-songy voice with "in the name of love" it was met with a cathartic belly laugh.
Aside from the fact that there are too few of these hearty jokes in the film, Kwapis' complete lack of style makes the film feel rather vanilla. The fact that the director has had a long career in television is not all that shocking. He approached License to Wed like a standard issue traffic cop, making sure the camera and actors are where they should be and little else. License to Wed couldn't have had a blander style, and I am sure it won't come as a surprise to any of you that the film opens with "Here Comes the Bride". Yeah, the film is that generic.
Being a chick flick, License to Wed falls into the predictable genre formula, but that is the least of the picture's problems. Dodgy laughs sprinkled few and far between just shouldn't go hand in hand with a Robin Williams comedy; the man is just naturally too funny for that, which should be a tell tale sign that something is most certainly not right with this film. Its family friendly nature should make License to Wed at least passable for most general audiences, but more than likely it will leave fans looking for a fun escapist comedy disappointed.
-Joe Russo, MoviePulse.net
Movie Review: Not bad, but not good either; just meh...
Summary: 2 Stars
There are parts within `License to Wed' that will make you laugh, and even a few scenes that may make you laugh hard, but in the end `License to Wed' cannot be called a good film because quite frankly, it's not. I really wanted to love this film, and while I did like it to a certain extent there were still times when I felt it was almost a wasted evening. I love me some Mandy Moore and really hope that she picks up the ball and makes some better role choices in the near future because her recent film choices have been less than desirable. Now, `License to Wed' is light years beyond the ridiculous and utterly wasted effort that was `Because I Said So' but it is no where near the brilliance that was `Saved' so you see my dilemma. It's fair to midland at best.
The film follows a young and adorable couple Ben and Sadie who are undeniably in love. At Sadie's parents thirtieth wedding anniversary party Ben decides to purpose and this thus starts our little outing. Sadie has always dreamed of getting married at the same church her parents were wed but in order for them to do so they need to take a marriage preparation course put on by Reverend Frank. It becomes quickly apparent to Ben and to the audience that Frank is a psycho but for some strange reason no one else can see that. Ben quickly grows tired of Frank's rules and mind games and soon starts to wage war with the man in cloth only to drive a wedge further and further between Sadie and himself.
Mandy Moore is still adorable here but she falls a little flat due to the poor plot and dialog. John Krasinski is almost wasted here. He ends up being the punch line most of the time, leaving everyone around him to bring whatever funny there is at his expense. In fact, he finds himself upstaged almost every step of the way, even when the only other `actor' on the screen is a mechanical baby (who by the way should have been in EVERY scene). This brings us to Robin Williams. Now I have not seen `Man of the Year' but I hear it was not that rewarding either, so it appears to me that Williams is running into a bit of a snag in his career, going the way of De Niro as of late. This is sad because we all know he has so much more to offer. He offers nothing in `License to Wed' besides over the top antics that are at times extremely annoying. In fact, the funniest thing about Reverend Frank is the choir boy that follows him around everywhere he goes.
`License to Wed' is not going to be a film you remember, which is kind of a word in its defense. While there is nothing outstandingly wonderful to remember, there is nothing painstakingly horrible to remember either. Williams is annoying but forgivable and while the plot is far too overdone it is not like we expected something revolutionary or truly inventive. `License to Wed' is just a movie to pass the time. Something to watch and that's really it. I may never watch it again, but this is the type of film that doesn't warrant repeated viewings. I laughed a bit, sure, but I'll laugh more watching something else.