When I heard the news that Ashton Kutcher was the top contender along
with Prince William for the distinction of Bachelor of the Year, I could
scarcely believe it. What kind of a comparison is that? Prince Charming
vs. Lord of the Goofballs. I never found out who won; I was afraid I
might discover that Ashton had inexplicably received the honor (and why
was he even considered a bachelor, with his high-profile relationship
with Demi Moore?). Okay. So I don’t like Ashton Kutcher. And his
starring in Just Married was one of the reasons I had so little
interest in the movie. That, and I just thought it looked really dumb.
But I caught it at the dollar theater with a couple of friends, curious
to see if it was as awful as I thought it would be. Suffice it to say,
it was.
Ashton plays Tom Leezak, a clueless bozo reminiscent of his role as Kelso in That 70s Show.
He meets Sarah McNerney (Brittany Murphy) as a result of a freak
accident on the beach, wherein he knocks her out with a football. By the
next morning they’re smooching away in a beach house declaring their
love for one another. When Roger and Anita knocked each other in the
pond and fell in love in 101 Dalmatians, it was cute. In Just Married, it is just the beginning of many catastrophes to come.
Sarah lives the good life. The really good life. She’s filthy rich,
while Tom scrapes by a living as a disk jockey. While Sarah’s parents
encourage her to accept the affections of Ivy Leaguer Peter Prentis
(Christian Kane), Sarah insists that it is Tom whom she loves. In fact,
they’re already living together for quite some time before the marriage
makes it official. Throughout the entire period leading up to the
wedding, Tom’s self-serving, juvenile behavior won no points with me. In
one scene, apparently intended to be one of the biggest
laugh-generators of the film (it did get quite a chuckle from the
audience in my theater), Tom throws a ball out the second-story window
and Sarah’s dog leaps out to catch it and is hit by a car. I found the
scene cringe-worthy. To make things worse, Tom lies about what happened,
an act which will come back to haunt him later in the movie.
The movie itself is mostly one long flashback, as it begins with Sarah
and Tom huffily leaving the airport and resuming their own lives,
separately. Tom soon becomes miserable, however, and reminisces on their
relationship and what went wrong. So we know from the start that the
marriage is doomed, at least for a while. It takes all but about ten
minutes at the end of the movie to see it played out with as many cheap
gags and gross-out moments as possible. I probably laughed two or three
times in this movie. The rest of the time I groaned.
As their
vacation mishaps pile up, Peter shows up in Italy to try to win Sarah
back. He is, of course, supposed to be the Evil Boyfriend Approved By
Parents of such films as Far and Away and Titanic, but
other than the unscrupulous act of wooing someone on her honeymoon, he
seems like a pretty decent guy. I found Tom so thoroughly unlikable, I
was actually rooting for Evil Boyfriend! Though, to be honest, I didn’t
like Sarah a whole lot either. She’s pretty whiny and obnoxious herself,
though more palatable than Kutcher, at least in personality. Her voice
really grated on me, though. It sounded throughout the film as though
she had a sore throat, and I’m not sure if that was an affectation for
the movie or her actual voice. I haven’t seen enough of her to know.
Either way, I found it very unpleasant to listen to.
Of
course, by the end of the movie, there’s a big happy reconciliation. How
couldn’t there be? Tom crashes Sarah’s mansion and spouts out some
romantic spiel, and she runs back into his arms. Hooray. What a
surprise. I guess in the end they deserve each other, but the only thing
happy about the ending as far as I was concerned is that I didn’t have
to suffer through this movie anymore.
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