Just Married

Just Married

It takes more than pretty people and striking locations to make a good movie, but the makers of Just Married seem to have forgotten that. Shot after shot features stars Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy framed against the Alps, or Venice's St. Mark's Square. And, like an IMAX film or a porno movie, Just Married seems to think that visuals alone will do the trick. A comedy almost solely in the sense that it contains gags that seem designed, at least on some theoretical level, to prompt laughter, the movie stars Kutcher and Murphy as a couple who meet cute, get married, and then have a disastrous European honeymoon reportedly inspired by screenwriter Sam Harper's own problem-plagued honeymoon in Italy 15 years ago. If that's true, Harper and his wife spent much of their time getting body parts stuck in embarrassing locations, falling down, and screaming at one another; these activities more or less make up the entire content of the film. All of this would be fine if it transpired with the least bit of flair (assuming there's a compelling way to construct a gag about someone getting a foot caught in an airplane toilet while trying to have sex), but director Shawn Levy brings a yeoman-like joylessness to the project, spoiling whatever fun might have been had. Kutcher and Murphy seem game enough, and it's a testament to their charisma that they're the hardest element of the film to hate. But after a while, it's easy to wish they'd simply divorce–or reconcile, or whatever they need to do–and be done with it, if only to silence Kutcher's incessant screaming and the throaty laugh that Murphy leans on whenever the energy level starts to drop. With any luck, Harper's subsequent married life has proven too uneventful to necessitate a sequel.

 
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