Marry Me review – This charismatic romcom might as well have been called JLo: The Movie

Dir: Kat Coiro. Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Maluma, Sarah Silverman, Chloe Coleman, John Bradley. 12A, 112 mins.

There’s always been a Jennifer Lopez disconnect. In reality, Lopez is a diva extraordinaire, a fabulously wealthy, one-woman entertainment ecosystem. On film, Lopez is the perennial working-class striver: a wedding planner, a maid in Manhattan, a retail worker waiting for life’s second act. Coupled with many of her pop anthems – “I’m Real”, “Love Don’t Cost a Thing” – she has repeatedly used her work to distance herself from the persona she’s otherwise cultivated. Marry Me, her latest attempt to resuscitate the romcom, makes literal that strange contradiction. It revolves around a pop superstar trapped in a glass cage of fame and fortune, and the vulnerable, ordinary woman crying out for love underneath. It could have been called “JLo: The Movie”.

Directed by Kat Coiro, Marry Me casts Lopez as Kat Valdez, who has agreed to marry her equally famous pop star boyfriend Bastian (Maluma) during a Madison Square Garden concert. Mere seconds before she hits the stage, she discovers via a TMZ alert that he’s been cheating on her with her assistant. Devastated but wearing an expensive wedding dress and standing under a spotlight, she does what any self-respecting publicity hound would do: she plucks a random audience member from the crowd and marries him instead. Luckily for Kat, maths teacher Charlie (Owen Wilson) is a gentle divorceé with a cute kid and no real interest in being famous. Faster than you can say Notting Hill, they start to fall for one another.

It is the highest of high concepts – even for a genre that’s always embraced them – and Marry Me just about gets away with it. No, it’s never clear why sensible, earnest Charlie goes along with such a wacky stunt, or at least what’s in it for him. But Wilson’s neurotic charm, which becomes more Woody Allen-esque with every passing year (sorry), overrides the more fantastical silliness here. He and Lopez have winsome chemistry, and the film admirably plays into their surface incompatibility. “He’s cute, right?” Kat asks her assistant at one point. On her assistant’s look of cynicism, Kat backtracks: “OK, he’s fine.”

Lopez is sensational, sourcing pathos – whether intentionally or not – from the similarities between herself and her character. When Kat whimpers over Jimmy Fallon (in a far-too-extended cameo as himself), joking on TV that she’s “no stranger to weddings”, your mind naturally goes to Lopez’s own dramatic love life. Later, when she sadly remarks that she’s never been nominated for anything, it reminds us of Lopez’s maddening lack of Oscar attention for 2019’s Hustlers. Fact and fiction blurs throughout.

If only the film around her had a few more dramatic stakes to grab onto. As it stands, conflict emerges from the resurfacing of Bastian – a subplot far too reliant on Maluma, a charismatic pop star but plywood when it comes to acting – and whether or not Charlie’s daughter can win a maths tournament. It’s all curiously lukewarm, while the enormous gulf between uber-famous Kat and man-on-the-street Charlie is left unexplored beyond a tepid debate about Kat’s social media usage.

It leaves Marry Me a few script drafts away from “future Sunday-afternoon romcom classic” territory, as much as Lopez and Wilson try their hardest. Still, in an era in which many of Lopez’s romcom peers – namely the Witherspoons and the Bullocks – have pivoted to dark dramas, it’s lovely to see her still banging the drum for a genre that’s never earned the respect it’s deserved. Then again, she knows what that feels like.