Offended by life, Alice (Kristen Bell) and her eternally dissatisfied brother Paul (Ben Platt) receive frilly wedding invitations from the rich half-sister Eloise (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) and reluctantly go to a gala event in England. Their optimistic mother Donna (Allison Janney), in contrast, is very excited about the upcoming event. For her, this is a long-awaited opportunity to finally see all the children together, because the last time the family gathered in this composition was at the funeral of her second husband, Bill, the father of Alice and Paul. Alas, there is no smell of spiritual reunion in London. With their behavior, the clumsy American family spoils a luxurious pre-wedding dinner and almost disrupts the main event, so that the bride manages to regret her obsessive desire to get close to relatives a thousand times over.
It’s not hard to guess that the “The People We Hate at the Wedding” in the film’s title are Alice, Paul, and Donna. The instigators of chaos, however, must be given their due – clumsy relatives create conflict situations unintentionally and without malicious intent. The basis of numerous clashes and showdowns between members of the family lay on duty grievances and omissions. Alice is angry at her sister, Paul sharpens his teeth at his mother, Eloise pouts at all the guests at once. In general, the usual graters of relatives.
Against the background of the cycle of squabbling and showdown, it is hardly possible to feel sympathy for at least one participant in the showdown. All the characters are unnaturally caricatured and deadly predictable, as if the most hackneyed clichés and clichés were used to create their psychological portraits. Alice (Bell) is a classic thirty-something loser who sleeps with her boss and naively believes that he will leave his wife and child. Paul (Platt) is a conservative gay man stuck in a toxic relationship. Eloise (Addai-Robinson) is a nervous bride who, sooner or later, is bound to lash out at the wedding planners for not being able to tell white from cream. The secondary characters are written in the same way. Here is a successful businessman who fools his wife and mistress in order to sleep with both. His antipode is an ordinary guy, a real romantic, ready to help just a little, even if before that he was cruelly beaten. Guess which one of them Kristen Bell’s character will end up with in the finale? The viewer has already seen such a standard set of movie characters many times, and the authors of the script do not bring anything new to these images.
Jokes could save the situation, but in a humorous sense, the American comedy “The People We Hate at the Wedding” also cannot boast of originality. Heroes vomit anywhere, lose their underwear in front of the public, get stuck with their heads in a dress in the middle of a fitting room in a fashion store – you can’t think of anything more banal. Unless cakes are smeared on each other’s faces, although this scene is logically replaced by an awkward fight next to desserts. All attempts to portray something funny look so clumsy that, willy-nilly, you begin to experience “Spanish shame”, but not for the heroes of the picture, but for the actors forced to play such mediocre scenes. Even the dubious and literally toilet humor of “Bachelorette Party in Vegas” caused either awkward chuckles or wild laughter, but in “People We Hate at the Wedding” acting out the level of Melissa McCarthy, of course, is not to be expected.
The novelty of streaming clearly demonstrates that the film needs at least one superstar, because the company of mediocre comedians will definitely not be able to pull off a wretched script. Even if it is directed by one of the directors who worked on TV shows like The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Miracle Workers, it was just such a person (Claire Scanlon) who directed the filming process. Of course, it would be reckless to expect great Oscar-level jokes from an online novelty from Amazon Prime, but I also didn’t really want to watch such a soulless and ordinary movie with a predictable happy ending.
The People We Hate at the Wedding is a completely forgettable comedy with third-rate humor. For whom this is filmed is still a big mystery. The streaming novelty turned out to be as boring and pretentious as the wedding of rich relatives. If this was the main idea, then its implementation was definitely a success.
