It’s the time around Mother’s Day, it’s summer and it’s time for the splashy, mindless, mushy romcoms to come out, and Neflix got Mean Girls and Freaky Friday director Mark Roberts to make one, set at a destination wedding in Phuket, no less. It can serve as an armchair vacation to a beautiful resort.
Brooke Shields plays Lana, “a world renowned geneticist,” who still holds in her heart the ghosting by a man she loved in college. She went on to marry another man, lost him to an accident, and has a daughter, Emma (Miranda Cosgrove).
In an internship in London, Emma meets and falls in love with RJ (Sean Teale), and breaks the news of her engagement to her mother suddenly.
Since Emma is an Instagram influencer, the wedding is sponsored and to be live-streamed under the supervision of Camala (Tasneem Roc), who controls everything about the event, including what everybody will wear and sat at the toast. When Lana arrives in Phuket and meets RJ, she is shocked to learn that he is the son of the long-ago boyfriend, Will (Benjamin Bratt), who had jilted her thirty years ago, and is now fortuitously single.
There is the usual sniping between the two, and Emma wrings her hands fearing the sponsors will pull out. The wedding part includes a gay couple and Lana’s annoying, man-crazy bestie (Rachel Harris), who ogles every man in sight (it’s not funny when a man does it, and it is as offensive if a woman passes lewd comments on a man.)
There’s not much plot, but plenty of tourist-trap visuals of Phuket, lit in glorious sunshine. For conflict, there’s a hunky doctor (Chad Michal Murray), who flirts with Lana, even though he is much younger. (“I’ve got underwear older than him,” says Lana, the successful career woman, who is always reduced to a fast-blinking mess whenever there’s a situation not to her liking.)
The writing (by Robin Bernheim) is bland and banal, and has for giggles a scene like Lana running into Will in the buff, accidentally hitting him in the groin with a pickle ball, and all the oldies going skinny dipping at a vacant beach, not noticing the camera capturing their antics. Obviously, the women are all swimsuit ready and the men all nicely six-packed and shirtless.
The mother, whom Camala exasperatingly calls Mama Winslow, is a possessive sort, who does not want Emma to act independently, or choose how to run her life. Brooke Shields’s (also a producer of the project) outrageous over acting does not exactly endear her to the viewer.
There’s a Bollywood-style dance number in the end, which is worth sitting through this film for—at least the location is eye candy and it’s possible to watch such a bubble-gummy film while scrolling on the phone or multi-tasking in other ways.
Mother Of The Bride
Directed by Mark Waters
Cast: Brooke Shields, Benjamin Bratt, Miranda Cosgrove, Sean Teale and others
On Netflix
