112 min | PG-13 | February 11, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A global pop star gets jilted on stage in front of millions and marries a random man holding a sign in the crowd. He is a divorced math teacher who came along to chaperone his kid. The fantasy works until you ask it a single question.
Kat Valdez is a pop superstar on the verge of marrying her equally famous fiancé during a livestreamed concert. Seconds before the vows, she learns he cheated. She turns to the crowd, spots a stranger holding a “Marry Me” sign, and marries him instead. The film wants to be a fairy tale about celebrity loneliness and ordinary decency, and it is really about whether a marketing stunt can become a marriage if the algorithm approves.
Jennifer Lopez plays Kat with the polish of someone who has lived inside this machine, and she sells the exhaustion behind the gloss. She is most convincing in the quiet scenes where Kat realizes nobody around her is paid to disagree with her. Owen Wilson plays Charlie Gilbert, the divorced math teacher, with his familiar low-key bewilderment, and the chemistry the film depends on does materialize. Maluma plays Bastian as a vain pop product, which is the joke and also the limit of the part. Sarah Silverman gets a few sharp lines as Charlie’s colleague Parker, and Chloe Coleman grounds the thing as Charlie’s daughter Lou.
Kat Coiro directs from a script by Tami Sagher, Harper Dill, and John Rogers, and the staging leans hard on screens. Phones, livestream counters, and comment feeds are layered into nearly every early frame, so the audience experiences Kat’s life as a scrolling feed before it lets her be a person. The musical numbers are shot with concert-grade gloss while the school scenes go flat and warm, a deliberate contrast that the editing never quite trusts itself to hold. The film keeps cutting back to follower counts as a substitute for stakes.
The result is a glossy package built around two performers who are better than the material gives them room to be. The premise has a real idea inside it about manufactured intimacy and the people who get cast as props in someone else’s brand. The script notices that idea and then smooths it into the exact reassurance its star exists to sell. It is a pleasant fantasy that flatters everyone and risks nothing.