Summary
Mother of the Bride is clearly a distraction for something else. It’s absolutely mindless.
Mother of the Bride could have at least tried to make an effort. I know Netflix needed a branded movie title for America’s Mother’s Day, but this is Hallmark Movie Lite. I’m convinced that these throwaway movies that happen to be filmed in exotic places (Thailand was the destination here) are part of a money laundering scheme. Brooke Shields, Benjamin Bratt, and Miranda Cosgrove get a breezy acting gig in humid weather while the executives conduct forensic accounting.
As the title suggests, the story follows the mother of a soon-to-be bride. Emma (Cosgrove) is going to marry RJ (Sean Teale), but she’s worried about her overbearing, controlling mother, Lana (Shields). While at their beautiful wedding destination, Emma soon learns that her mother has a romantic past with RJ’s father, Will (Bratt). Yeah, you already know where the story is going here.
Expect Lana to be dismayed by the presence of Will as the wedding holiday soon turns into presumed chaos, which really means micro-flirting to the obvious outcome. It’s a story where a mother, with apparent self-centeredness, competes with her daughter in the sexual marketplace at their wedding. The story, by default, is a selfish one but is glammed up as a friendly, light narrative.
And I’m all for stories about selfish parenting, but it at least needs to be a tiny bit interesting. Mother of the Bride feels like the entire production team and cast are on holiday, like one of those knock-off Netflix Adam Sandler movies. I’m all for mindless fun, but the fact this movie is produced by professionals is incomprehensible. There’s no substance, chemistry, or spark at all. I half expected to see one of the camera crew slopping on sunscreen between shots.
Did I care if Lana and Will ended up together? Did I care if Emma and RJ married? And did I care if the mother and daughter had issues due to this unwarranted competition for the spotlight? Absolutely not.
And just like someone argued on my TikTok:
“Sometimes a movie is just something to relax with and not spend brainpower on. I don’t watch The Meg 2 and expect a gripping storyline; I watch it to see a big shark go chomp.”
I agree. I watched The Meg to watch a “big shark go chomp,” just like I watched Mother of the Bride to relax and care about a relationship. But it still needs to be a movie, not the equivalent of a college film project.
Many agree with me, which is why the audience and critics’ scores on Rotten Tomatoes are insanely low.
Mother of the Bride Rotten Tomatoes Score on 10th May 2024 (Credit – RT)
As Natalia Winkelman said in her review for the New York Times:
“The best screwball gag this movie can muster is a pickleball shot to the groin.”
Which is true — the fact that Mother of the Bride nearly had a saving grace by pummelling a man in the balls is every reason to stay away from this movie.
Mother of the Bride Ending Explained
According to Google’s “helpful” search results, people really care about the ending of Mother of the Bride, so I’ll break it down quickly.
Yes, Lana and Will end up together after their children, Emma and RJ, tie the knot. Obviously, there are complications because Lana believes that Will has a woman on the side, but it turns out that she is his personal assistant. Phew.
Anyway, before all this, there was an extra drama as Emma was trying to connect her wedding to her career opportunities, which is obviously selfish (like her mother). But Emma agrees with her mother by the end of the movie that weddings are meant to be about family. It’s actually MIND-BLOWING that this was wrong. Weddings are about the couple getting married. It should be about them. It doesn’t surprise me that they’ve got the message wrong, especially when, thematically, it focuses on self-centered people.
Is it a good ending? Who cares, really? What makes it more laughable is that when the credits roll, it shows all the cast having a good time, dancing and basking in the evening humidity, convincing myself even more that this is a money laundering scheme.
