Beautiful Wedding

Beautiful Wedding: The unsophisticated and horrified viewers were treated to the release of the film Beautiful Disaster in 2023. It’s part of this weird era of film where everyone just wants to come up with their own variation of Fifty Shades AKA Take bad fanfiction, sand off all the serial numbers and base an entire movie around it. Because of this, we got the cringe inducing After film series, the sexual assaulting 365 Days film series and one film that exists, Beautiful Disaster which featured a toxic boxer and an innocent girl who made a bet that neither of them will have sex for thirty days, which in these sorts of films eventually results in both of them getting together. It was certainly not the worst version of this kind of movie, but it was rather unfathomably awful (I named it the 8th worst movie of 2023, and I still firmly believe that) therefore knowing the fact that a sequel was coming out made my blood freeze. I honestly thought the After series was over, maybe for a moment I would be saved from this trash, but no. Seems the creative geniuses at Prime Studios have other plans for me, for the worse.

Abby Abernathy (Virginia Gardner) and Travis Maddox (Dylan Sprouse) did end up having the time of their lives in their first adventures in romance in the previous year. They seem to have quite the stories to tell after their recent wild night in Vegas. Not only do they both end up with a large sum of money and a brand new tattoo, but they are also husband and wife. However, instead of doing what might be interesting; which is to find out what happened, they take their friends Shepley (Austin North) and America (Libe Barer) to Mexico on honeymoon to contemplate whether they should revocate the marriage or stick to it where none is explaining why the basic principle of the plane is not applicable here. After all there is a sequence of events that lead up to ‘why don’t they just try and cut off the marriage in Vegas instead of going to Mexico?’ Even if there is a structure to this chaotic mess, it becomes evident how this was intended to appeal to the audience.

It is safe to say that one can overlook the massive wave of dram that comes with this film, or rather abuse of the concept of drama in context of relationships, almost instantly as soon as it gets shifted back into the realm of beautiful drama that was abused in the first movie because this…and I can’t stress this enough, is far less of a disaster. If someone were to ask ‘Did someone say ‘cash grab’?’ after watching the first film in this series, Beautiful Disaster this second film is not only a direct parody of past glorified dramatic relationships but manages to pull it off quite well at times.

It seems at certain times, the movie is utterly ludicrous because it blatantly over-exaggerates key elements of After, Fifty Shades and 365 Days, and one can see why such a potential might have existed. Of course, however, that potential is not reached because this film appears to have been penned over 20 years ago with much of the humor as fresh as sour milk, but at least there are glimpses of how this could have been successful.

What is absolutely comical is that Beautiful Wedding a sequel to Beautiful Disaster and this movie pairs better with an ice cream cake than chocolate syrup. One has got to be lurking inside a movie that, if I’m being very honest, is a playfully self-aware take on its own filmography. I wonder how it transitions from a movie that is quite generously, a story about a princess who gets rescued, to a story where they had to use animation on a few frames. Music from the majority of the scenes was stolen from a Daffy Duck cartoon including silly sound effects meant for kids and even random shots of animated male genitals for a gag. And where does it say that this is the film hard to connect with, it does not even fit the narrative style in any of the films that have come before it or what the movie offers at this particular moment in time.

On the note of those performances, I have to say the world has to owe everything to Dylan and Virginia for their best efforts to see that this film does not completely fall apart. They mostly fail because attempting to salvage this film is akin to saying you climbed a 30 foot wall, naked and in oil but by goodness they manage to perform.

Their unfiltered appeal and great delivery make it seem as though a smile is right around the corner whenever they’re handed a line that comes close to teasing a joke, They are not entirely terrible considering the fact that they are clearly miscast (is it so hard to accept Dylan Sprouse as a kickboxer with anger issues? If he were able to sell that image, the dude would win an Oscar) but this kind of commitment can only take you so far with a script this old.

Honestly, watching this film was like watching an unorthodox film made by Roger Kumble after he made Cruel Intentions. This can easily be concluded from the mindless comedy that runs throughout the film. Firstly, the humor in this film is very basic, and relies on cliched settings. Someone in the movie has just returned from what felt like an eternally long and cringe inducing Mexican ‘honey moon’, where I witnessed the portrayal of a clichéd marching band trying to play a single tune “la cucaracha” annoying as hell. It’s as if a low-cost sitcom was created that had only been made for the 1990s. Everything feels like something one has heard a million times before: the ‘trivial’ American culture, scripted sitcoms, and embarrassing jokes somewhere along the way. While it is fine that the creators of the film have no shame in bowing down to cliches, why take it so far for them to rely on things only the unfunniest films in history have to offer? While the actors are what you would refer to as comedians, the ‘have two events at the same time, and I have to make it to both’ sketch has been used overly too many times in this century.

When the Beautiful Wedding couple is not funny, boring, or just plain bland, it is being bewildering, which is a great thing to add as a cherry on the cake. The plot seems to follow a random trajectory; events just take place without any purpose. We begin with the key crew members waking up to discover that two of them are already in a matrimonial relationship and then inexplicably cut to wedding-congratulations and them preparing to get onto an army plane. One character apparently seeks after them to recover the money, but this is a subordinate storyline that does not involve the main protagonists and has no significance vis-a-vis the overarching narrative. Furthermore, the entire “Why don’t we seek an annulment” scenario is often treated as a running joke with attachments to the plot as a whole, but rather than continually meaningless interludes, it is more like a series of interludes.

I’m not saying the story necessarily has to be some complicated plot that has been developed over time, I know what movie we’re discussing here but it would be nice if people’s actions did not stem from phrases like “Oh, we have a place and this actress is ‘comfortable’ flaunting this body part so let us shoot it.”

There is no pretending that Beautiful Wedding is a movie that can be classified as good, one would argue almost objectively that it is a bad film and offers no benefit of any insight to the viewer who undergoes the ordeal of watching such a film “Beautiful Wedding”. It’s mostly just kind of boring. It’s not horrible enough to incite the blood, it’s not shocking enough to get self-righteous about, and it is not a film that had such high expectations (even as enjoyable garbage) that leaves the viewers unsatisfied. No, it is just boring. It’s boring film that from time to time teetering between ‘unwatchable’ and ‘unintentional comedy’ but it’s boring.

This movie Beautiful Wedding could have had a good chance to be successful and funny in terms of lampooning romantic comedies some twenty years ago when they were all the rage, but today, in 2024? It’s just nothing special. It’s a run-of-the-mill film that barely manages to stay in the audience’s minds.

Watch free movies like Beautiful Wedding on Fmovies