MADE OF HONOR: 2 ½ STARS
Remember My Best Friend’s Wedding? Julia Roberts played Julianne, a woman who realizes she is deeply in love with her best friend Michael (Dermot Mulroney) after he announces that he is to be married to another woman. Play switcheroo with the gender, update the wardrobe, add in the Highland Games and you have Made of Honor, the latest film from Grey’s Anatomy actor Patrick Dempsey.
Made of Honor may not have originality on its side but it does provide a few laughs and some beautiful scenery.
In this topsy-turvy reexamination of My Best Friend’s Wedding Dempsey is Tom, the kind of rich playboy who only exists in rom coms. He’s a unrepentant womanizer, wealthy beyond belief and always seems to be able to find a parking spot on the busiest of Manhattan streets. His best friend is Hannah (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’s Michelle Monaghan) is the Ginger to his Fred, the AC to his DC. They’re able to stay friends because they have no romantic bond.
That is until Hannah travels to Scotland on a six week business trip. Absence makes Tom’s heart grow fonder, and he decides to ask her to marry him as soon as she hits the tarmac back in the States. There’s only one problem, she returns from her trip with a fiancée in tow and plans to move to Scotland with her newly found and wealthy mate. Fearing he is about to lose the love of his life, Tom, who has accepted Hannah’s invitation to be her maid of honor, tries to derail the wedding and win Hannah’s hand.
Made of Honor has all the usual romantic comedy ingredients—the prerequisite New York setting, madcap misunderstandings, the big moment of realization that person A can’t possibly live without person B and some beautiful exotic scenery. We’ve seen it all before in countless other movies, but Made of Honor pulls it all together in, not exactly a memorable way, but at least in a frothy enough way to make the audience I saw it with ooh and ah and make the appropriate romantic comedy cooing sounds during the screening.
Much of the success of the film has to do with Patrick Dempsey who seems born to star in these kinds of confections. He’s good looking, has a way with comedy and doesn’t mind doing a pratfall or two. Co-star Monaghan isn’t given much to do other than to react to Dempsey’s antics, but she is a presence and the camera loves her.
Made of Honor is an amiable, but ultimately forgettable rom com that relies just a bit too heavily on the conventions of the genre.
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