Beautiful Wedding (2024) – Annulment

Released: 8th March
Seen: 12th March

In 2023 the film Beautiful Disaster was unleashed onto an unsuspecting and unwilling public. It’s part of this weird era of film where everyone wants to do their own Fifty Shades AKA Take a shitty fanfiction, file off some serial numbers and make a movie about it. This gave us the awful After series, the rapey 365 Days series and a series that exists, Beautiful Disaster paired a bad boy boxer and an innocent young woman who made a bet with each other that they wouldn’t sleep together for 30 days, which naturally led to the both of them starting a relationship because that’s how these movies go. It was certainly not the worst version of this kind of movie, but it was pretty bad (I named it the 8th worst movie of 2023, something that I stand by) so knowing that a sequel was coming out made my blood run cold. I thought the After series was done, maybe I’d be free from this crap for a while but no… Prime Studios have other plans for me, bad plans.

After their grand adventures in romance last year, Abby Abernathy (Virginia Gardner) and Travis Maddox (Dylan Sprouse) wake up in Vegas discovering they have a large amount of money, a new tattoo and also they’re married. Instead of doing what might be interesting and trying to figure out what happened, they take their friends Shepley (Austin North) and America (Libe Barer) with them to have a Mexican honeymoon where they can also try to figure out if they should stick this marriage out or get it annulled… no, I do not know why they don’t just stay in Vegas to do that because that would imply this movie explained anything that it was trying to do or was made with any sense of artistic idea beyond “Well this kind of worked before, let’s try again”

To give Beautiful Wedding the praise that it probably doesn’t deserve, this film is a dramatic step up from Beautiful Disaster. While Beautiful Disaster felt like they were trying to make an After knockoff and accidentally threw in a few moments of comedy, this one is just an outright parody of the genre and there are actually moments when it almost works. There are several scenes that feel like they are just taking the things that After, Fifty Shades and 365 Days did dead seriously and turned them up to 11 in order to be absurd and when those moments hit you can see where the potential might lie. Now obviously, it doesn’t hit that potential because this film feels like it was written in 1998 and the jokes aged like milk left out on the counter, but at least you can see where this might have worked.

What really doesn’t work is that Beautiful Wedding a sequel to Beautiful Disaster and this film could not have a more contrasting tone if it tried. We’ve gone from a film that, at my most generous, could be described as a subtle ribbing of genre conventions to a film that is at one point quite literally a cartoon. Every scene is scored like someone looked up a similar scene from a Looney Toons cartoon and stole the music, there are wacky sound effects and little animated penises that pop up occasionally to make a joke even sillier. It’s a tone that is so over the top that it doesn’t fit with anything about this story, certainly not with the film that came before it or with the performances that we’re witnessing. 

Speaking of those performances, all credit in the world has to go to Dylan and Virginia who are trying their darndest to make sure that this film is at least in some way enjoyable. They mostly fail because trying to make this into a good film is like trying to climb up a 30-foot wall while naked and covered in oil but god damn it do they try. Their raw charm and genuinely great delivery almost pull out a laugh every time something that resembles a joke is put in their mouths, They commit to the bit as much as it’s possible to commit when you are clearly miscast (does anyone seriously buy Dylan Sprouse as a kickboxer with rage issues? If he had managed to make that believable, the man would’ve earned a fucking Oscar) but that commitment can only do so much when you have a script this dated.

The entire script for this film feels like it was a leftover draft of something Roger Kumble meant to make back in the early 2000s after his success with Cruel Intentions because every single joke and scenario from this film feels like a remnant of that era. From the Mexican honeymoon setting (complete with a literal marching band playing La Cucuracha every chance they can get) to the shitty cultural jokes that were barely tolerable back then, to cliche scenes lifted right out of shitty sitcoms, every single joke here has been done before so many times and by so many much funnier people. These actors are funny, but we’ve seen the “I have two events on at the same time and have to appear at both” bit so many times by now that it’s not funny, even if you throw in a lengthy discussion about how massive the main characters cock is meant to be (it’s a running joke, as in I want to run away every time they make that joke).

When Beautiful Wedding isn’t being unfunny, uninteresting or just kind of dull, it’s being confusing which is a fun thing to throw on top of everything. Things just kind of happen in this movie, there’s nothing motivated about anything. We start with the main cast waking up to learn that two of them are married and then literally jump cut to them about to board an army plane (??!?!!!) so they can go to Mexico for their honeymoon. A character allegedly follows them to try and get the money back, but it’s a side plot that never really affects the main cast and means nothing to the overall plot. The whole “Should we get an annulment” thing is basically an occasional running gag but doesn’t really mean much to the story, it’s just scene after scene of “What can we do in Mexico during a honeymoon movie” without any rhyme or reason. Not saying the plot needs to be some grandly planned spectacle, I’m aware of what movie we’re talking about here, but it might help if people’s actions felt like they were motivated by something other than “Look, we have access to this location and this person is willing to show off this body part so let’s work with that”. 

There is no pretending that Beautiful Wedding is a good movie, it’s almost objectively a bad film that offers nothing of substance for those who subject themselves to it… but it’s mostly just kind of dull. It’s not hateful enough to anger the blood, it’s not offensive enough to get righteous about, and it’s not a film that had some great promise (even as fun trash) that lets the audience down. No, it’s just dull. It’s a dull film that occasionally flickers between watchable and actually quite bad (opening with the main cast basically waterboarding someone was certainly not the best omen) but it’s just dull. Maybe if this came out 20 years ago when the shitty romcoms were at their peak it might have been timely and had a moment of being somewhat interesting in its mocking of conventions… but in 2024? It’s a bland dated film that is blessed with the gift of being forgettable.