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'Just Married' sure to have short honeymoon with audiences
Brittany Murphy and Ashton Kutcher play newlyweds in 'Just Married'
Tracy Bennet, 20th Century Fox
Most of it is told in flashbacks, with flashbacks within flashbacks.
There's nothing unusual about a comedy beginning as a divorce settlement approaches or one partner's re-marriage nears, at which time both parties review their relationship and fall back in love.
In "Just Married," the more appropriate question is: What did these two 20-something children find attractive in each other's behavior in the first place?
Tom (Ashton Kutcher) and Sarah (Brittany Murphy) act spitefully when they arrive home in Los Angeles from their disastrous European honeymoon. As he drops her off, he half-dismantles the front of her parents' estate.
They had met 10 months ago, had sex almost instantly and moved in together a month later. One of the film's repetitious jokes is that there's no sex on the honeymoon.
It's one of the indications that Sam Harper's screenplay confuses irony with humor. Now if they'd been celibate … But this is more like a first anniversary trip. So what's funny?
Sarah is a Wellesley graduate whose parents are the McNerneys (Veronica Cartwright and David Rasche).
Mom's nickname is Pussy. (That's your cue to double up laughing.) It's hard to be sure whether "Just Married" is ripping off the hilarious surname joke in "Meet the Parents" or just rehashing the Pussy Galore gag from "Goldfinger."
The film makes sure the audience grasps that Sarah's daddy is a rich bad guy by giving him a dated ethnic epithet to utter.
Tom is a community college dropout (educational contrast underscored) who works inattentively at radio traffic reporting and wants to do sports talk.
The movie thinks he's cute and funny, so we're supposed to hope he and Sarah work it out.
They're being shadowed around Europe by her rich former lover, beau Peter Prentiss (Christian Kane), who, if played by Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart half a century ago, would have gotten the girl in the last reel. Which would explain the unconsummated honeymoon.
Strangely, for all of its repetition, the honeymoon comedy eschews any depiction of the reception but delivers a lot of bloody noses, crushed walls and flatulence by an elderly woman.
"Just Married" also is weirdly out of touch in unnecessarily dumb details. The honeymooners, for example, wake up in their hotel room an hour before their international flight. Cut to them making the plane. The sequence doesn't even try to be funny, so what's the point? Nor does the film note that Tom seems to carry manicure scissors onto the flight undetected.
Director Shawn Levy doesn't seem to have an overview, a grasp of why the events strung together should strike anyone as amusing, much less what would make the couple entertaining. His picture runs on training wheels, wobbling from side to side in a quest to get rolling.
| 'Just Married' |
Director: Shawn Levy
Stars: Ashton Kutcher, Brittany Murphy, Christian Kane
MPAA Rating: PG-13, for sexual content, some crude humor and a brief drug reference
