Billed as a fun and sexy romantic comedy, and slapped with the tagline “Guess who’s coming out for the wedding!”, Kiss the Bride is in reality a rather forced and wearying gay(er) send-up of My Best Friend’s Wedding, directed in a very boxed-in, flat fashion by C. Jay Cox, the writer of the blockbuster Reese Witherspoon hit Sweet Home Alabama.

Scripted by by Ty Lieberman, the movie chronicles the impending nuptials of seemingly happy heterosexual couple Ryan (James O’Shea) and Alex (Tori Spelling, a bit less wince-inducing than usual), whose marriage is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Ryan’s old high school friend Matt (Phillip Karner, of Will & Grace and Sex and the City), now a hotshot, big city magazine editor. As the movie’s blowjob flashback sequence quickly establishes, Ryan and Matt had a fling in their teenage years. Matt may still even be in love with Ryan, who knows. A hard-boiled (and newly single, naturally) cynic, he drops everything when he finds out about the wedding. So as the big day fast approaches, old feelings resurface and secrets are revealed. Individually and collectively, the characters must balance the past with the present, and make choices that will determine the rest of their lives.

The first film produced by the Outfest Screenwriter’s Lab, a dynamic three-day, mentor-led workshop in Los Angeles ran by Outfest, the leading organization nurturing and preserving LGBT film images and artistry, Kiss the Bride, in its endgame, aims to be a somewhat realistic and messy exploration of the complex sexual landscape of today’s society. How it gets there, though, is a mess. Heartily embracing the, umm, very borrowed nature of its narrative roots (Matt’s assistant even tells him early on, “You are so Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding right now!”), the movie quickly becomes a litany of fetishistic depictions (well-oiled shirtless guys in low-slung pants, the occasional shamrock tattoo) that come across as a heterosexual caricature of gay cinema. The jokes, meanwhile, are all easy and predictable, strung together scene-to-scene by rib-poking, upbeat ditties that serve as aural emotional placeholders. Furthermore, the film’s slapdash shooting schedule and production value are
underscored in a variety of scenes that devolve into lengthy, static
chatfests.

The exceptions, the scenes that do offer up a bit of spiked curiosity — another high school flashback to Matt and Ryan playing a game of “Battlestrip,” and doing shots out of paper cups, or a pre-bachelor party sequence in which Matt takes umbrage with the derogatory use of the word gay by a couple of Ryan’s redneck friends — either drag on too long or dip into a different tone that makes the film seem stilted and off-stride. Of course, nothing does that quite so much as Spelling’s earnest exhortion of, “You guys should fuck!” upon finding out about her fiancé’s predilection. Yes, Kiss the Bride is fascinating in some respects, but not always in the good sense of that word. Some of its bit players (a group that includes Joanna Cassidy, Robert Foxworth and Amber Benson) deliver maximum effort, but there’s not enough of wit or substance here to make this Bride worthy of a rental’s kiss.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case, Kiss the Bride is presented in 16×9 widescreen, with Dolby digital 2.0 and Dolby digital 5.1 English language tracks. A feature-length audio commentary track kicks off the bonus materials, comprised of Karner, O’Shea and Cox. Their rapport is warm and winning, but they also spend a lot of time jokingly critiquing wardrobe and their bodies, which grows old. Other anecdotes include stories about Spelling’s allergies (she was apparently six to seven months pregnant when filming), a pancake-related continuity error, and the use of a trophy to simulate a bulge in Karner’s pants. Other supplemental extras include 13 minutes worth of deleted scenes (an extended bridal shopping sequence takes up a lot of this running time) with optional commentary from Cox; a 25-minute making-of featurette comprised of back-slapping interview tidbits interspersed with lots of clips from the movie; the theatrical trailer; a two-minute scrollable photo gallery montage; and previews for other Here! releases. To purchase Kiss the Bride on DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B (Disc)