Beautiful Wedding

Grade: D

Beautiful Wedding has one outtake that plays before the end credits. Two guys are jumping around acting ridiculous because something good just happened in a football game. Director Roger Kumble keeps the camera rolling and rolling and rolling without calling “cut,” and just lets these two go off. Finally one of them breaks character, stops, and says “Jesus, Roger!” He speaks for the audience, which tonight, was just me. This movie is playing for two nights as a Fathom Event, and I was alone in the theater.

It reminds me of the joke about seeing a sign in the park that said, in regular English letters, “no dogs allowed, except for seeing eye dogs.” The punchline is “who is that sign for?” I’m not sure who Beautiful Wedding is for. It’s so shallow and stupid and unfunny and clumsy and annoying and juvenile in so many ways, that the target audience can’t possibly be old enough to get admittance, due to the R rating. 17 is the age minimum, and the IQ maximum.

Based on the novella of the same name, Beautiful Wedding (part of author Jamie McGuire’s “Beautiful” series) is a sequel to a movie that came out last year called Beautiful Disaster. I drank the Kool-Aid on that one big time, mainly because of star Virginia Gardner – my biggest celebrity crush right now. About Beautiful Disaster, I wrote: “There’s a sequel coming up – Beautiful Wedding. Already filmed, with most of the same cast, currently in post-production. I’ll see it, and might even read it first. I’ve got the fever.”

I did read it. Not much of anything happens. It’s more of an epilogue than a standalone story. It doesn’t matter anyway, because the movie is extremely different. Our hero and heroine Travis (Dylan Sprouse, one of the twins who shared the role of Adam Sandler’s foster son in Big Daddy) and Abby (Virginia Gardner) wake up hungover in Vegas to find out they got married by Elvis the night before, and are in trouble with a powerful kingpin. They owe him money, but instead, decide to skip town and go to a fabulous resort in Mexico for their honeymoon.

Nothing that happens is remotely plausible. Everything is blown up to the most grotesque, nightmarish slapstick – desperate for laughs, and achieving none. It’s the Airplane and Naked Gun movies on crack. Every conflict seems forcefully manufactured, like when Abby takes her top off at a clothing-optional beach, and Travis punches every guy who so much as looks at her. Travis’s cousin Shepley is dating Abby’s best friend America. They are our Supporting Couple, and they know it. I’d call Shepley bumbling, but that would be an insult to bumblers. Every time I think he’s going to be a real character, all that gets thrown out the window for another lame “bit.”

Once again, Virginia Gardner looks great. Last year, she singlehandedly pulled Beautiful Disaster and See You on Venus out of the swamp and finagled favorable reviews from me, but even she can’t save Beautiful Wedding. It’s not real enough, sexy enough, or funny enough. She’s too good, in every way, to spend a career starring in such…I’d say buffoonery, but I don’t want to be disrespectful to buffoons. The fever has broken. Jesus, Roger!

Grade: D