101 min | R | January 27, 2023 | Prime Video
A destination wedding in the Philippines goes sideways when pirates storm the resort and take the guests hostage. The bride and groom, mid-breakup, have to save everyone while sorting out whether they still want to get married. The premise promises chaos and delivers a shrug.
Darcy Rivera and Tom Fowler are getting married at a tropical resort surrounded by both their families. Cold feet set in before the ceremony. Then armed pirates seize the venue and herd the wedding party into the pool at gunpoint. The film wants to be two things at once. It is a relationship comedy about a couple deciding if they belong together, and it is an action movie about that couple killing kidnappers with kitchen knives and grenades. Mark Hammer’s script keeps cutting between the bickering and the bloodshed, and the two never combine into a single idea.
Jennifer Lopez plays Darcy as competent and irritated, a woman who notices the danger before the men do and resents having to fix it in a torn wedding dress. Josh Duhamel plays Tom as an over-planner whose romantic gestures curdle into control. The pairing generates friction but not heat. Jennifer Coolidge plays Carol, Tom’s mother, and treats every line as a found object to inspect and mispronounce. She walks off with the film. Lenny Kravitz appears as Sean Hawkins, Darcy’s wealthy ex, and exists mostly to make Tom insecure. Cheech Marin and Sonia Braga play the warring parents and get stranded in reaction shots.
Jason Moore directs the action with a flatness that undercuts the stakes. The fight choreography stays legible, but the camera holds at a polite distance that drains the violence of impact and the comedy of timing. The resort photography looks like a brochure, all turquoise water and white linen, which fights the grime the hostage plot needs. The score pushes pop cues over the set pieces to signal fun rather than build it. The editing intercuts gore and gags so quickly that neither registers before the next beat arrives.
The problem is structural and the cast cannot fix it. A hostage thriller needs dread, and a romcom needs charm, and this film keeps trading one for the other before either lands. Lopez and Coolidge supply moments that work in isolation. The connective tissue around them is generic and weightless. The movie mistakes mixing two genres for blending them, and the result tastes like neither.