Just Married

REVIEW
Just Married is the kind of impractical, improbable deplorable comedy that only Hollywood could seem to muster. We spend very little time caring about these characters during the film and they are completely forgettable afterwards. The screenplay replaces the witty dialogue of a Bringing Up Baby variety with physical humor of a Three Stooges ilk, while coming nowhere near the greatness of either. Kutcher and Murphy play a lovey-dovey pair that met when he accidentally hit her in the head with a football (guffaw). It’s instant love, captured in two quick scenes, allowing the audience to fill in the gaps. (No time for exposition, we’ve got cars to crash and heads to bump!) They marry and their subsequent honeymoon is a disaster. But can their love stand the test of time? You’ll be too busy wincing at the ill-conceived comic moments and the parade of international stereotypes to notice. Aside from the two leads, who do nothing to liven a dead screenplay, every peripheral character is a caricature and every non-American one is a full-blown hackneyed disgrace. Hear the Chinese doorman make jokes in broken English! Hear the stuffy Frenchman talk in a “funny” accent! Then shower it all with grandiose ideas of love and let simmer. The saddest thing here is that the concept behind this film could make for a clever romantic comedy about two young people trying to hash out the degrees of feeling in their relationship. But since the filmmakers drained the movie of any and all of that kind of potential, a better title for this one may be Just Marred.