Say “maybe” to Jennifer Lopez’s Marry Me

Credit to the casting genius who thought to pair Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson in a glossy romantic comedy. It’s a choice that’s at once entirely unexpected and immediately endearing. Though the erstwhile Anaconda co-stars have each done their fair share of rom-com work over the years, they feel like they exist in different corners of the Hollywood sphere, which benefits Marry Me’s “unlikely couple” premise. And given that Owen Wilson is basically the American Hugh Grant, it makes sense that he’d eventually lead a Notting Hill-style romance—one that lets Lopez winkingly riff on her own celebrity persona just as Julia Roberts did in that 1999 Richard Curtis classic. If only Marry Me had trusted its stars’ charming chemistry a little more.

Lopez plays Kat Valdez, a music superstar whose rollercoaster love life is a regular punchline for late night talk show hosts. (Like Lopez, Kat has been married three times.) The hits just keep coming when she discovers that her pop star fiancé Bastian (Colombian singer Maluma) is cheating on her just as she’s about to marry him live on stage in front of a global audience of 20 million people. Instead of soldiering on with the ceremony, Kat decides to do the next best thing: pull a random man out of the crowd and marry him instead. This is how she meets her unsuspecting beau, a nerdy math teacher/single dad named Charlie (Wilson), who goes through with the onstage nuptials out of a mix of confusion, empathy, and peer pressure. And because why would you expect a stage show wedding to be legally binding?

It’s an absolutely outlandish rom-com premise, and though the film tries to lampshade it as such (#whatishappening pops up in the movie’s in-world social media), part of what keeps Marry Me watchable is the dangling question of what kind of hoops the movie is going to jump through to justify keeping up the matrimonial charade. In this case, Kat and her team quickly convince Charlie to stay married for three to six months so they can get some positive PR to help wipe away the wedding fiasco, which seems like questionable logic at best. Still, it’s better than when Kat briefly tries to argue that forcing a random man to marry you for publicity is feminist, actually.

For a while, at least, the meta tension of the loopy plotting mixed with the meta fascination of seeing Lopez essentially play herself on screen is enough to keep the film whirling along. In their quieter moments, Lopez and Wilson develop a sweet, oddball chemistry. In contrast to the awe and disbelief of Notting Hill’s leading man, Wilson gives Charlie more of a backbone. He’s the one doing Kat a favor and that gives their relationship an interesting sense of equality despite her celebrity status. While Grant’s Will Thacker seemed perpetually terrified of making a mistake, Wilson’s Charlie has the confidence to openly acknowledge when his dynamic with Kat starts to become more than just friendly.

Unfortunately, Marry Me doesn’t have the confidence to fully embrace that low-key hangout vibe all the way through. It prioritizes first act set-up and third act hurdles, with too little of the charming middle that makes a rom-com float or sink. There are three credited screenwriters working from a graphic novel by Bobby Crosby, and you can feel the tension of all those voices in the mix. Themes about social media and self-sufficiency come and go without any real follow-through. And for as much as the movie wants to cheekily evoke Lopez’s real-life experiences, there’s a limit to how far it will take that.

While pop star romances like The Bodyguard and Beyond The Lights fully lean into the darker side of fame, Lopez clearly doesn’t want to bite the sponcon hand that feeds her. Thus potentially intriguing questions about the tension between wanting privacy and wanting to use every aspect of your personal life to court fame melt away into generic platitudes about “saying yes” and “living in the moment.” Marry Me can’t quite figure out what it wants the conflict of its central relationship to be, which leaves the reliable Lopez with too little to play. And Charlie’s arc in relation to hers feels even more muddled. Is he there to challenge her or be her support system?

Of course, thematic depth isn’t strictly necessary in a lighthearted studio rom-com. But in between the nine original songs Lopez performs throughout the film, there’s just enough downtime to let your mind wander to questions of structure and tone. Supporting player Sarah Silverman is the only actor who consistently earns laughs in a comedy that’s surprisingly somber at times—at least before it swings for the broadest tropes in its manic third act. On the whole, Marry Me is one of those romantic comedies that’s easier to love in theory than in practice, which, to be fair, can still carry the genre far for some casual Valentine’s Day viewing. There’s undoubtedly a lot of stuff that works here, although that also makes the stuff that doesn’t more frustrating. Still, as Lopez continues her campaign to reemerge as America’s rom-com queen, hopefully she and Wilson will get a second crack at love.