License to Wed is not a boy-meets-girl story. Rather, it's a story about a boy, Ben (John Krasinski), and a girl, Sadie (Mandy Moore), who already live together and want to get married. However, they have conflicting ideas about how and where to stage the wedding. Ben wants a casual ceremony on a beach in the Caribbean, but Sadie says no, they must get married at her parish church, by the same minister, Reverend Frank, who presided over her parents' wedding.
This is where the funny stuff is supposed to begin--for when Ben and Sadie go to meet Reverend Frank, guess who they find? Why, it's Robin Williams disguised as a man-of-the-cloth, wearing a black outfit with a stiff white collar and trying his best to look pious. 英文影评 he's still doing the same old Robin Williams shtick, tossing off verbal zingers that fly right over the heads of his apparently clueless co-stars. But perhaps Ben and Sadie just appear to be a bit thick, because they're stunned by what Rev. Frank is telling them. Before he can marry them, he says, they must pass his unique marriage preparation course, which imposes a mandatory set of requirements that are either unrealistically stringent or off-the-wall wacky. Like, they won't be able to have any more sex until the honeymoon.
For Ben, the no-sex rule is not funny. Ditto the class in which he and Sadie have to learn how to bicker like an old married couple. Least amusing of all is the baby-rearing segment of Father Frank's program, in which Ben and Sadie are obliged to spend 24 hours taking care of "twins"--a pair of uglier-than-sin, infant-sized robots who whimper and cry and puke and poop just like real babies. The only funny moment here is when an exasperated Ben tries to quiet one of the robo-tots by bashing its head against a department store display case as his fellow shoppers look on in horror.
A major problem with License to Wed is the script, which props up an already shaky premise with a series of weak plot devices and then patches the whole together with a lot of lame jokes. (One running gag is the presence of Rev. Frank's sidekick, an obnoxious boy-of-the-cloth played by the child actor Josh Flitter as a veritable Mini-Me. He's sorta cute, but also kinda creepy--and not at all funny.) But the chief reason why nothing works here is that the actors, talented performers all, just don't seem to be in the same movie. While his tics and naughty ad-libs are more under control than usual, Williams nevertheless steamrolls over anyone else in the same frame with him. In the TV hit "The Office," Krasinski is a perfect deadpan foil for the quietly neurotic Steve Carrell. But when pitted against the whirligig Williams, his comedic gifts are paralyzed to the extent that he looks downright catatonic.
And while both Krasinski and Moore exude a great deal of charm, they seem to have difficulty directing it toward each other. Their romantic moments aren't romantic, and their comic moments just aren't funny. And you can't have a romantic comedy without romance or comedy--or, better yet, both.
