Column:
‘Made’ shouldn’t have been made
Published May 9, 2008
Let’s begin with the title. “Made of Honor” is a pun, I guess, because in this mediocre “My Best Friend’s Wedding” knock-off our hero Tom (Patrick Dempsey) is made to be his bestfriend- and-secret-true-love’s maid of honor at her whirlwind wedding to a Scottish duke.
But what is it a pun on? I seriously can’t figure it out: Tom is, in fact, the least-honorable character in the movie. It seems like this should be a movie about a Navy SEAL fighting terrorists at his best friend’s wedding or something — which would, if nothing else, make me feel better about watching this instead of “Iron Man.” What I’m left with, with the inexplicable title and the movie as a whole, is the sense that someone opened up the romantic comedy mold and forgot to put any movie into it. This ham-fisted failure will leave you with a newfound respect for successful romantic comedies. And successful puns, for that matter.
The plot has been done a million times, and it’s not really a problem that we know how this movie is going to end from the very beginning. The issue is that Tom and Hannah are, from the beginning of the movie, way too perfect for each other. They eat each other’s food, they finish each other’s sentences, they go out to dinner all the time — for God’s sake, they kiss a lot. To attempt to keep these characters apart for 90 minutes is to insult the audience’s intelligence.
Enter writer Adam Sztykiel (whose previous acting credit on IMDb is — I am completely serious — “Corey Haim’s voice”), who totally forgets to create the kind of conflict that complicates the genre’s best films and, instead, resorts to nothing but “Three’s Company”— style misunderstandings to pad the movie out past 30 minutes.
All the sitcom tropes are present: A character walks in on another during what appears to be — but isn’t — sex, a dramatic revelation of true love is spoiled by obnoxious secondary characters and an important phone call is missed thanks to a secondary character who just doesn’t know he is in a romantic comedy. All that’s left by the end of the film is for Tom to take two dates to the same restaurant or deliver a baby in a crowded subway car.
But most ruinously, for a romantic comedy, there’s no reason to root for these characters to get together. Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan are likable enough as romantic leads, but their characters are not only oblivious but also sleazy. By the would-be triumphant end of the film, in which our heroes basically get to second base in front of the jilted fiancé’s entire family, I just wanted them both to get together so they’d leave. If “Made of Honor” had even a whit of charm it could be pleasant enough, incomprehensible name aside — but it proves unsuccessful as both a romance and a comedy. Somewhere, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are shaking their heads.