With her ex-fiance standing as the best man at her sister’s wedding, Kat hires Nick, a male escort, to accompany her to the wedding in London in an effort to make him jealous. Of course, things take a turn when Kat finds herself falling for Nick while still sorting through her issues with her ex.
The Wedding Date has a really great cast. While I’ve never been a huge fan of Debra Messing, I thought she was quite charming and funny in this film as Kat, a woman with a massive amount of insecurities and awkwardness. Dermot Mulroney has grown on me quite a bit over the years and I find myself enjoying him in most things, though I really wish he could be given a rom-com role with more depth. We get to know Kat enough, given the fact that this is her sister’s wedding and she’s surrounded by family.
Nick is never really fleshed out, though Mulroney does well enough despite how little he’s given to do. He’s an escort, hired by Kat to accompany her to this wedding… that’s more or less all we really get to know about him. Sure, we hear him answer some of Kat’s questions about his profession, but his job really has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. He could have just been a friend or some random guy she met and offered to pay money to in order to play her boyfriend for the weekend. Maybe the film, and the role itself, would have been more interesting if his profession came into play somewhere. To me, that’s a much bigger, and much more interesting romantic conflict than what you ultimately end up getting.
We also get the wonderful Jack Davenport and a young, blonde Amy Adams as the soon-to-be newlyweds. Jeremy Sheffield and Sarah Bishop round out the cast as the bland Jeffrey, Kat’s ex-fiance and Ed’s best man, and TJ, one of Kat and Amy’s closest friends who was delightfully funny but was sadly underutilized.
I think the issue with a 90-minute movie (less if you take out the length of the opening and closing credits) is that there’s really not a whole lot of time here for character development. Some of the supporting cast could have been removed from the film and it wouldn’t have made a difference to the plot whatsoever. While the movie was briskly paced, I think that was a detriment. Messing and Mulroney had nice chemistry but I’m not sure they were together on screen long enough to make their whirlwind romance completely believable. The family drama and revealed betrayal get swept under the rug quickly without any real consequences for the parties involved. I think it would have been more beneficial to the story for the “secret” to be revealed earlier so both Nick and Kat would have had to deal with the heightened emotional stakes together. As it is in the film, the conflict to drive Kat and Nick apart felt a bit contrived.
I found The Wedding Date to be enjoyable enough. I didn’t outwardly cringe or roll my eyes. It has a fantastic cast, but the script is lacking and full of rom-com tropes that aren’t executed well enough to get a pass. There was potential here but the movie simply didn’t rise to the occasion. I also know The Wedding Date was based on a book so maybe I’ll give it a read and see if it’s any better.
