I’m starting to think that studios have stopped trying altogether. I’ll admit to liking many dumb comedies; I even think Dude, Where’s My Car? is okay. These days, however, even our bad comedies are worse than usual. Yet, somehow, people flock to see them. I know people who’ve seen Just Married twice. They saw it once… and they liked it enough to see it ANOTHER TIME. I could deal with someone liking it. I could deal with someone seeing it again because his or her brother rented it or something. But to see it twice, in theatres… that just makes me lose my faith in the movie-going public, not to mention the studios for churning out this kinds of bland crap.
Tom Leezak (Ashton Kutcher) and Sarah McNerney (Brittany Murphy) meet cute. She’s walking her dog, he’s playing football with his other Neanderthal friends, she gets a football in the face and it’s love at first sight. They spend the night together and wake up on the ocean side in some sort of castle, where they share a long, languid kiss while the waves crash in the background and the romantic music swells. How romantic. How nauseating. Soon after (we’re meant to just know this, because nothing indicates a passage in time), they live together and Tom mistakenly gets her pooch killed. He lies to her (because he loves her, see) and soon all is forgotten, as the pair is to be married. They spend their honeymoon in France, where a lot of kooky adventures happen, and eventually they get mad at each other (not a spoiler, since we know this from the beginning of the film).
To anyone who’s not brain-dead, it’s obvious what’s going to happen. “Who cares, as long as it’s funny getting there!” you say. Well… no. The majority of the film has “adults” acting (and reacting) like whiny adolescents; there’s no one over 18 who would ever act like that. Take for example the scene in which Tom, on his honeymoon, goes to a bar. He’s mad as his wife, so he picks up this tramp to make his wife jealous. This has not been a good method since grade eight. Whatever it takes to get the target audience to “identify” (OMG, this is soooooooo much like me and Brendan, LOL WTF!!!!!!!1111!!) with the film, this movie will do it.
Because this is a romantic movie, the script excises the typical bodily function jokes in favor of more “acceptable” gags. For example, the film features at least a dozen instances of people knocking their heads together, or people getting large objects thrown at their head, or people knocking their heads against walls, doors and various other surfaces. One or two gags like these were acceptable back in the Three Stooges era; a DOZEN in a supposedly modern film is overkill. Another thing: people named after bodily functions and genitalia has never been funny. Try telling that to the writers of this movie. I’ll admit to laughing out loud once or twice besides the many instances in which I had to mock the ridiculous plot. Even in the worst comedies, there’s at least one joke that’ll make me smile. Perhaps the best part of the film is the score; it’s completely ripped off the score from Badlands (which in turn was ripped off by True Romance) and it makes one yearn to see those movies instead of the tripe you’re currently sitting through.
This film coasts on the leads, for obvious reasons. Both are very pretty and very popular with “the kids”, but they don’t have an ounce of chemistry. Ironic, perhaps, since the pair fell in love during filming. Kutcher reprises his role of the befuddled buffoon once more; he’s pretty much his usual, typecast self. Murphy, while very cute and talented, stumbles with what very little material she has here. The supporting cast is the same throwaway bunch of TV actors as usual, save for a pair of cameos by Raymond J. Barry (the mourning father from Dead Man Walking) and Veronica Cartwright (the “woman who isn’t Ripley” from Alien). Perhaps they shouldn’t really be called cameos since very few people will actually know who these people are, but I digress.
Just Married is another throwaway teen comedy; there’s nothing to really save it from mediocrity. Films like these are doomed from the start; they’re a crap idea in a crap writer’s brain that develops into a crap film. Of course, these movies can be made for a minimal amount of money and by the time it gets out of theatres, it has made enough money to fund yet another clone of itself. For a brief moment in cinematic history, this method was used to make money off silly genre films (biker movies, vampire movies, women in prison movies); they may have been silly but they had a hell of a lot more originality to them than this one.
Ashton Kutcher (Dude, Where s My Car?, TV s That 70 s Show ) and Brittany Murphy (8 Mile, Don t Say A Word) take the cake in this outrageous hit comed...More at Buy.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.