The Wedding Date (2005)

Determined to attend her ditzy stepsister's wedding in England on the arm of a beau to show up her ex-boyfriend, Debra Messing hires Dermot Mulroney, a hunky male escort, at the eleventh hour for $6,000 from her retirement fund. Whether they're awkwardly seeking common ground or pretending to be in love, Messing and Mulroney have a nice chemistry together. Amy Adams is the self-absorbed airhead who's set to wed a mook who is even more oblivious of others' emotions (which helps during an altar-cation when his best man counsels, "Now is not the time to figure things out"). So the groom is the last to learn of a premarital secret that's been chewing through the bride's family for years. We catch glimpses of the relationship shared by Debra's and Amy's characters since they were little girls (until sundered by dueling boyfriends) and Dermot's self-confidence serves him well in shuttle diplomacy of sorts. (Debra says he's a therapist she met at a Knicks game but his real career skills are not that different.) The numerous deleted scenes were right to be excised, except the last one, which I found moving. The movie has a few mildly interesting character roles (including Holland Taylor as Debra's mother and Sarah Parish as the bawdy Brit girl who steals all her scenes). The movie is cleaner than it could have been but wears its tawdriness proudly; I won't go into details (nor does the parental warning that says "iffy for age 15+") but suffice it to say the cast includes strippers. Tellingly, the movie's best and most representative lines are "The best sex is make-up sex" and "I'd rather fight with you than have sex with anyone else." (How's that for romantic?) As a result, the movie's many positives are so tilted by unnecessary sexual negatives that I regrettably can't give it 4 stars, only 3.5 stars.