‘Made of Honor’ made of recycled materials

A Review

Click to Enlarge Browse Aspen Times Photos Patrick Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan star in “Made of Honor.” (Sony Pictures)

Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
Aspen, CO Colorado
May 2, 2008

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The greatest tribute Hollywood can pay to a film is to happily remake it while pre­tending to be doing nothing of the kind. Which is why what “Made of Honor” does best is remind you why “My Best Friend’s Wedding” was so memorable.

Actually, that’s not completely true. “Made of Honor” does star two first-rate romantic comedy leads, Patrick Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan, and it is always more than pleasant to experience their on-screen appeal. Which is part of the problem; playing platonic best friends who have thus far avoided a relationship but are so obviously destined for each oth­er takes even the tiniest air of doubt out of the will-they-or-won’t-they equation.

It also places increased demands on the filmmakers to make the time until this cou­ple realizes what everyone in the audience knows move swiftly and pleasantly. Unfor­tunately neither director Paul Weiland (“City Slickers II”) nor screenwriters Adam Sztykiel and the more experienced rewrit­ers Harry Elfont & Deborah Kaplan (“Josie and the Pussycats”) are fully up to that task. “Made” starts with a cute-meet 10 years in the past, with its protagonists still in col­lege. Dempsey’s Tom, already an obses­sive Casanova, mistakenly gets into bed with Monaghan’s Hannah, and she so adroitly puts him in his place that they immediately become the best of friends. Just like real life.

Cut to today’s New York, where Tom, wealthy as only the proud inventor of the coffee collar for take-out cups can be, is such catnip to women that they all but throw themselves at his feet. Hannah, now an art restorer, watches this with bemuse­ment but wonders aloud about a man who says “I love you” only to canines.

But just when, after prodding from the college buddies he still hangs out with, Tom realizes that Hannah might be the woman for him, fate steps in in the form of a business trip she takes to Scotland.

Hannah is gone for six weeks, and in that time manages to meet and get engaged to Colin (Kevin McKidd), a handsome Scots­man who is just about perfect. Not only is he charming and good-looking, he’s a nat­ural athlete, next door to royalty and the wealthy owner of the country’s largest whiskey distillery. And, as emphasized by one of “Made’s” too frequent excursions into feeble risque humor (the film was re­edited to avoid an R), he is also, as they say, well-endowed physically.

Unaware of Tom’s change of heart , Hannah asks him to be her maid of honor. Determined to sabotage this wedding from the inside, Tom agrees.

Both Dempsey, expert in “Enchanted,” and Monaghan, who’s brought a welcome spark to everything from “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” to “Gone Baby Gone,” are very good at what they do. If you’re in the mood for seeing a Lothario humbled by true love, you’re in luck. You may wish, however, that “Made of Honor” had given its stars something more of interest to occupy their time. And ours.

“Made of Honor” — Columbia Pictures presents a film directed by Paul Weiland. Running time: 101 minutes. Classified: PG-13 (for sexual content and language).

SECOND OPINION
Desson Thomson
The Washington Post
Where we do start with “Made of Hon­or'? And when can we stop?

At its best, a romantic comedy cele­brates one of humanity’s greatest yearn­ings: to give and to find the love of a life­time. At its worst (and this is where “Made of Honor” comes in), it can leave you with a bad taste, not just in your mouth but in your soul.

Yow! “Seriously?” you might ask. Even with the doubly delectable Patrick Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan?

Even with.

Should we start with the incessant jokes about oral sex, for instance? Not present­ed in the clumsy, almost endearing way characters talk about it in Judd Apatow movies. (That’s as much about male vul­nerability as it is licentiousness.) It’s more in the nudge-nudge way, as the filmmak­ers pander to the sleaziest instincts of the audience. It starts right away, as Dempsey’s Tom, in his early college days, is seen at Halloween, dressed up as a cigar-sniffing Bill Clinton who goes chas­ing after a coed wearing a Monica mask.

Dempsey and Monaghan have it all, in terms of looks, likability and even how they blend together. But they’re hapless prisoners in a nasty little caper that fol­lows convention as conventionally as pos­sible. Tom is a ladykiller, and Hannah (Monaghan) is the one woman he never quite seduces. Who becomes his best friend. And the one, he realizes, he has been in love with all along. Cue the impos­sibly wonderful Colin (Kevin McKidd), whom Hannah decides to marry. So she asks Tom to be her male maid of honor. You’ll never — ever! — guess how this turns out.