The first trailer for Justin Zackham’s Big Wedding is not funny. What is funny about it, however, is how absolutely crammed it is with just about every bad hallmark of romantic comedies we’ve come to expect from the genre in the last decade or so. There’s the laughable premise – an adopted man forces his divorced parents to pretend to be married so that his deeply religious biological mother doesn’t (what? take him back?) freak out during his own wedding. There’s a soundtrack cobbled together with overused (and, frankly, nonsensical in context) tunes like “You Can’t Hurry Love” and “What I Like About You.” There’s a couple of pugs (awww). There are hijinks. There is an entire sequence of the family’s patriarch getting punched in the face.
And there is an all-star cast crammed into the sort of boxes we’ve come to expect from all of them – Susan Sarandon is oversexed! Robert De Niro is silly! Diane Keaton is uncomfortable! Katherine Heigl is brittle! Robin Williams has forgotten he used to be a comedic genius! Topher Grace is…also there! Check out the film’s bizarrely SNL-like trailer after the break, if only to see De Niro get tapped.
Big Wedding opens on October 26th.
