Marry Me is a ridiculous movie. A world-wide superstar singer, Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez), and her world-wide superstar singer fiancé Bastian (Maluma) are getting married mid-concert, in front of millions of fans across the world. But when Kat learns Bastian has been cheating on her with her assistant only moments before the two are set to exchange vows. So, in what can only be described as a moment of pure insanity, Kat decides to pick a random person out of the crowd to marry instead. She lands on Owen Wilson’s Charlie, who just so happens to be holding a sign saying “Marry Me” (the name of Kat and Bastian’s hit duet), which he was only holding because his friend shoved it into his hands to hold for her. So, ridiculous, right?
But that’s not the problem. The problem is that it’s not ridiculous enough. Marry Me is as cookie cutter and by the numbers as they come. It takes the bonkers premise and then only uses that as a way for Kat and Charlie to meet. Pretty much everything after the concert marriage is your typical rom-com stuff, only even more surface-level than usual.
Charlie is a middle school math teacher and a divorced, single parent. Getting caught up in a pop superstar’s life should completely upend his daily life. But he has clear boundaries which he makes known from the start, and then everything is just okay? Movies need conflict to maintain audience interest. With the vastly different lifestyles or Charlie and Kat, there are countless built-in ways to bring up some conflict, to either seriously threaten the relationship or to simply provide some comic relief.
We do get a tiny dose of that, particularly in one of Charlie’s first experiences with the paparazzi. But even that only last for mere moments. In the end, there was no need for Kat to be this global sensation. She could have just been a wealthy person that meets Charlie by chance – still from completely different worlds – and they decide to give dating a chance. It would have barely changed the course of the movie, or the resulting quality.
By using this setup, Marry Me gave itself the opportunity to say something really interesting about celebrity culture, social media obsession, breaking out of your shell, never being too old to grow as a person. But it runs away at every opportunity. Not every movie has to have some larger meaning. Sometimes movies can just simply be movies. But if you lead the audience into thinking the movie does in fact have a bigger message, it’s a fundamental failure to not even attempt to explore that.
It might sound like I despised Marry Me, but I didn’t. Yes, it’s nonsensical and threw away its modest hopes of being an above average rom-com. But I actually kind of enjoyed it. And that’s mainly because Jennifer Lopez is a cheat code. Especially here, where she’s basically playing a fictionalized version of herself. When given the chance, she can be a great actor. But what she is – and always is – is a superstar, in every sense of the word. She’s beautiful, she’s charming, she can sing, she just has that magnetic quality that draws people to her.
It also never hurts to let Lopez perform, especially with the original song “On My Way” which I unironically love. No one strained any brain cells writing it, but it’s a classic earworm pop song, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t listened to it multiple, multiple times already.
And that star quality is needed here, as she and Owen Wilson have almost no chemistry. Two of the most likable people in Hollywood should be able to make for at least a passable couple. And they have a few moments, but you never really buy into them being together. It would have made sense at the beginning of the relationship, with them being such an unlikely pair. But that should have developed over the course of the movie, and it just didn’t.
And so it falls to J Lo to squeeze every ounce of worthwhile material out of Marry Me. Nearly everything good in the movie is thanks to her. Even with minimal character development (an unfortunate trend for everyone else, too), her natural charisma and personality still manage to break through to make Marry Me a somewhat enjoyable, if entirely forgettable, movie.
Score: 56/100
