‘Shotgun Wedding’ Review: Jennifer Lopez’s New Rom-Com Is the Plane Movie You Never Asked For

Should you ever find yourself needing to kill time on a long journey — say, to a friend’s ill-advised nuptials in some distant tropical locale — you could probably do worse than Shotgun Wedding. It is, in a lot of ways, the quintessential plane movie: not bad enough to be offensive, neither good enough to demand your full attention nor complicated enough to require it, and better than having nothing to watch at all.

Here on the ground, though, where the options for theatrical and streaming content are nigh infinite, it’s a much harder sell. Directed by Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect), Shotgun Wedding amounts to an action romantic comedy in which the action is uninspired, the romance tepid and the comedy flat — such that not even rom-com queen Jennifer Lopez can elevate it above aggressive mediocrity.

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 Billed in its press materials as “Die Hard at a destination wedding,” Shotgun Wedding centers on Darcy (Lopez) and Tom (Josh Duhamel), who are set to wed at an island resort. Minutes before the ceremony, however, the event is invaded by a gang of masked, armed, mostly anonymous pirates. It falls on the bride and groom, the only members of the party who’ve evaded capture, to save their guests — even as unresolved arguments and cold feet threaten to wreck their marriage before it begins.

The film has a few scant charms. As vacation porn goes, the luxurious suites, tranquil beaches and lush scenery of the resort (supposedly located in the Philippines, though shooting took place entirely in the Dominican Republic) is downright White Lotus-worthy. The supporting cast is stuffed with well-liked performers, including Jennifer Coolidge as Tom’s clueless mom, Sonia Braga and Cheech Marin as Darcy’s warring parents, D’Arcy Carden as a ditzy yoga instructor and Lenny Kravitz as Darcy’s too-slick ex-boyfriend. There are occasional moments of unexpected sweetness, including one impromptu, a cappella sing-along to a cheesy ’90s ballad.

Mostly, though, Shotgun Wedding‘s defining quality is its squandered potential. Its R-rated action scenes include a car crash, a boat chase, multiple zipline sequences, several violent deaths and many unconvincing CG explosions, but none are interesting enough to leave a memorable impression. For every gag that merits a giggle, there are a dozen lines that sound sort of like jokes but contain no actual humor. “I am not a monster. I am an entrepreneur!” the villain shouts at one point, and it’s unclear if it’s meant to be a revealing character moment, an absurd non sequitur, a critique of capitalist greed or just a semi-random collection of words.

The promising cast struggle to make much of a script (written by Mark Hammer) that never seems to have imagined any of its characters’ lives or personalities outside this particular event. Coolidge, an actor who can and has launched entire meme cycles with a single uttered word, has so little to do here that she gets stuck with the same not-that-clever line twice: “I’m a mother. I can be upset about a lot of things at the same time!” An initially promising subplot about two wedding guests (Callie Hernandez and Desmin Borges) striking up an unexpected connection — and thus fulfilling the beloved trope of the second-banana couple with the looser, wackier energy than the main pairing — goes nowhere when Shotgun Wedding‘s interest in them peters out around the midway point.

Nowhere is Shotgun Wedding‘s waste of talent more glaring than in its leading duo. Duhamel and Lopez spend a big chunk of the 100-minute run time literally handcuffed together, yet never generate enough chemistry to convince us they belong together. Nor do they conjure any sparks with their incessant, ostensibly comedic bickering. Lopez, such a warm and engaging presence in last year’s Marry Me, goes so broad here that Darcy comes off as downright exasperating; Duhamel gets a couple of fun line readings but mostly struggles to keep up with his scene partner’s cartoonish energy.

Indeed, among the only times Darcy and Tom seem believable as a couple is when they’re arguing seriously about whether they should get married at all. The issues driving them apart are of the relatable sort that have driven rom-coms forward since time immemorial: He’s a groomzilla so focused on the big day that he’s lost sight of the relationship itself; she’s a commitment-phobe nervous about going all-in on an institution she doesn’t completely trust to begin with. But amid all the haphazard violence and half-hearted jokes, Shotgun Wedding forgets to counterbalance these differences with enough sweetness, sexiness and mutual understanding to make Darcy and Tom worth rooting for as a couple.

Shotgun Wedding does end on a relatively high note, with handheld camcorder footage of its characters at the reception, singing and dancing and cracking the occasional joke about their very recent, very harrowing ordeal. It’s one of the few moments the film slows down long enough to appreciate the love binding all its characters together, and possibly the single most winning moment of this whole ordeal. It’s also not really a scene from the movie at all. In a final example of Shotgun Wedding‘s mismanagement of its resources, it’s the bit that plays over the end credits — just in time for viewers to click away and forget any of this ever happened.