Perhaps the movie feels restrained because of its PG-13 rating: its touchstones are clearly Richard Curtis’s rom-coms of the 1990s and early 2000s eg. For example, when Kat decides to attend the school prom as Charlie’s plus one, everyone is so awkward but friendly, and no one’s worried about a student playing a prank similarly, none of the classmates of Charlie’s daughter Lou (Chloe Coleman) make fun of her father’s unusual situation, even though kids can be cruel! The film is so intent on being a gentle, conflict-free experience that Kat behaves surprisingly courteously towards her ex-fiancé Bastian (Maluma), which strains our credulity even more than the main premise. You can imagine the filmmakers wanted to avoid obvious scenarios, like having Charlie get sunburned on a vacation with Kat, or embarrass himself at a celebrity soirée, but what we get instead is so amiable it becomes uninteresting. And there’s the rub: Marry Me is so determined to be a pleasant and relaxed romance, that it becomes plodding as a result - there’s a lot of sweet and sentimental scenes of Lopez and Wilson’s characters just getting to know each other, and enjoying each other’s company, but little else in the way of memorable comedy. It’s emblematic of Coiro (and screenwriters John Rogers, Tami Sagher, and Harper Dill)’s overall approach, which is to eschew obvious laughs in favor of gently contrasting the differences between Kat and Charlie’s lives, which sometimes results in great one liners, but for the most part aims to make you simply delight in them coming together. Wilson, meanwhile, utilizes his easygoing charm to perfectly persuade you he would go along to calm her down.
The parallels between Valdez and Lopez are pretty evident - it’s the first time she’s portrayed a singer since Selena - and you can’t help but feel she’s channeling her own relationship history into the character’s fear and heartbreak. It’s an absurd situation, and responsible for a good many laughs in the first half hour, as it’s the only way you can react to the unfolding disaster without wanting to curl up into a ball but Coiro makes sure the sequence, as contrived as it is, feel believable too, using the spare minutes beforehand to establish Kat’s anxiety about pulling off a perfect wedding. Rather than canceling the ceremony, she picks a stranger, Charlie (Wilson), a divorced maths teacher in the audience with his daughter and a friend, to marry her instead.
One of the most unlikely comic book movies of the year, She-Hulk director Kat Coiro’s romantic comedy Marry Me - based on the webcomic by Bobby Crosby and (an unfortunately uncredited) Remy “Eisu” Mokhtar - features Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson in the tale of a similarly unexpected pairing: Kat Valdez (Lopez), a pop star, discovers her fiancé cheated on her, moments before they are due to be married on stage.
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