Summer Movie Suicide Mission No. 4: Made of Honor

In which one man attempts to view every summer blockbuster for the entire season, regardless of taste, genre, or sickening McDreamyness.

As I sat alone in the movie theater (completely alone, which was equal parts surreal and sublime) and waited for the start of today’s feature, I saw a promo for the MTV Movie Awards starring Mike Myers, in which Myers satirizes some of the more overused conventions in moviemaking, like the unnecessary celebrity cameo, or when a robot explodes as soon as it learns to feel love. It turns out they missed one: a suitor’s mad dash to stop his beloved’s wedding just before the vows are spoken. Luckily, Made of Honor was there to pick up the slack.

In the film, Patrick Dempsey (known as McDreamy to the normals) plays a hot shit socialite and serial womanizer who’s wealthy beyond necessity due to his invention of the “coffee collar,” that little cardboard sleeve that keeps you from burning your hand on a hot coffee cup. It’s a great invention, and I’d love to meet the real inventor responsible for it. I bet that person is swell, and would love to spend 100 minutes with him/her. I cannot say the same for Dempsey. Spending that much time with him was excruciating.

The thing is, Dempsey is not a particularly bad actor, and I say this as someone who’s not terribly familiar with his work. I went into Made of Honor with basically a clean McDreamy slate. His character in the film is just patently unlikable. The punny title is supposed to suggest that the protagonist is the most honorable man in the world, a sort of McDreamy the lionhearted, who will win the girl effortlessly. But Dempsey’s character begins the film prickish and juvenile, and doesn’t do too much to earn his stripes during the course of it. Yet at the end, he plays the hero anyway, in one of those tacky race to the altar moments I talked about earlier. 

Made of Honor is endlessly reductive in every way. Michelle Monaghan, an appealing actor who excelled in last year’s Gone Baby Gone, falls prey here to a script that doesn’t give her anywhere to go. Her character, Dempsey’s longtime best friend who asks Dempsey to serve as maid of honor at her wedding to a Scottish millionaire, is drawn as a pat pretty face who doesn’t so much fall in love with these men as accept their advances. When we meet her bridesmaids, one a cousin (Busy Phillips) who had had some previous sexual exploits with Dempsey (and was driven batshit crazy by the experience), and one a friend from camp (Emily Nelson) who serves as a canvas for all of the screenwriters’ worst fat jokes. For a film whose target demographic is surely women, these are incredibly insulting female characters. Also, for kicks, Monaghan’s grandmother spends most of the film wearing anal beads as a necklace. So there’s that.

The male characters are, for the most part, not much better. Dempsey made his fortune on the coffee collar, but doesn’t appear to do much else. His cabal of bros are just a bunch of yes men who rally around the supposed hero in his time of need. They come to the conclusion that they need to help him get the Scottish fiancee out of the picture when they realize that (a) he can dunk a basketball, and (b) while inexplicably watching him use the gym shower, they realize that the Scotsman has a giant cock. Certainly these were Dempsey’s two worst fears come horrifyingly true.

Somewhere in all this morass, Sydney Pollack delivers a fine supporting performance as Dempsey’s wealthy father, who has just married his fifth trophy wife. Pollack’s scenes are sweet and earnest, and were the only parts of this film that seemed bearable. The ending, which I won’t spoil more than I already have, induces groan after groan until, eventually, it just becomes unintentionally hilarious.

It’s really amazing that a wide audience would be drawn to a film like this. I felt like I had already seen every part of this movie as it was going on. But it did give me an idea. As soon as I can get my hands on one, I’m going to take the script for Made of Honor, randomly white out all the proper names and adjectives, and turn it into the world’s fattest Mad Lib. For as long as it takes, I’ll ask everyone I see to name a color, a fruit, a song title, etc., until it’s all filled in. Then I’m going to ship it to Hollywood and ride next summer’s gravy train.

Clear your schedule, Dempsey.

Film: Made of Honor
Director: Paul Weiland
Stars: Patrick Dempsey, Michelle Monaghan, Kevin McKidd, Sydney Pollack

Viewing Situation: Weekday matinee, solo engagement; digital projection
Rotten Tomatoes Average: 12%
My Grade (Out of 10): 1

Next Up: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian 

>>2008 MTV Movie Awards Promo [YouTube]

Editor’s Note: Stephanie Zacharek’s review was automatically linked to this post. You can read it here. She says some of the same things I say above, but I had not read her review in advance. Ms. Zacharek is one of my favorite critics, and I did not steal from her. She says it all better anyway, and she probably handled her filmgoing experience with more dignity.