MADE OF HONOR (*1/2) - Starring Patrick Dempsey, Michelle Monaghan, Kevin McKidd, Sydney Pollack, Busy Phillips, Chris Messina, Kadeem Hardison, Kathleen Quinlan and Elisabeth Hasselback.
Directed by Paul Weiland.
My first problem came in the first five seconds. No good movie has ever began with a Smashmouth song. My next problem came a minute later. When a woman is surprised in a comedy, she has to scream at the top of her lungs for a full minute while bouncing around and spraying mace in the eyes of he who startled her. What Happens in Vegas did the same thing.
The eventual premise is that Tom (Patrick Dempsey) and Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) have been best friends for ten years, but right around the time he's realizing she's the one, she gets engaged to a rugged Scot named Colin (Kevin McKidd). And so we have a role-reversal of My Best Friend's Wedding. So this movie can go one of two directions. Either Colin winds up being a cad and Tom gets Hannah, or Tom learns in the end to let Hannah go and end with a dance with his lesbian friend. And there's no lesbian friend. Or it could go the Sweet Home Alabama way, where Dempsey himself played the good-guy fiance who unbelievably just steps out of the way.
Let's just say around the 75-minute mark the deus ex machina enters, followed by one painfully contrived misunderstanding that felt like it hit the screenwriter one night when he was looking for one more complication before the inevitable ending. The third act is embarrassing for the all the actors to go through the motions of delivering mediocre summer fluff, and it just occured to me the end IS out of a Julia Roberts movie, just not My Best Friend's Wedding.
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