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10:24am ET, 12/02/08

A KYW Newsradio Movie Review

Made of Honor

by KYW's Bill Wine

Does Tom love Hannah? No, he likes her. They're friends. Have been since college a decade ago. Even though they sort of look like a match.

So Tom sees lots of women and Hannah looks elsewhere for Mr. Right. Then Hannah leaves New York and goes on a six-week business trip to Scotland. Surprise, surprise: Tom misses her so much that he realizes that he's been kidding himself. His life is incomplete without her.

To make things right and set the record straight, he'll tell her all this and ask her to marry him as soon as she returns.

Well, she returns, all right. But before Tom can utter a word, she introduces him to her Scottish fiancé. Whoops.

That's the setup for Made of Honor, a romantic comedy in themold of My Best Friend's Wedding, about a man in love with his engaged best friend.

When Hannah asks Tom to be the "maid of honor" at her wedding in Scotland, he agrees, intent on sabotaging the nuptials and establishing a beachhead for his own newly defined romantic happiness.

Made of Honor is a big-screen vehicle for Patrick Dempsey, whose popularity as Dr. Derek Shepherd, a.k.a. "McDreamy" on the television series "Grey's Anatomy," has ushered him back into the spotlight he snared as a movie lead 20 years ago in such comedies as Can't Buy Me Love and Loverboy.

And we even get to see him (with a little help from CGI) as a teen in the film's opening sequence.

Dempsey also carries the slapstick load, which he's game for and decent at. And he delivers the relaxed charm that the role calls for with ease and grace.

As for his chemistry with the appealing Monaghan, in a slightly underwritten role, it's sufficient if not exemplary in a film that is, for the most part, pleasant viewing. And the Scotland sequences couldn't be more photogenic.

British director Paul Weiland (City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold, Leonard Part 6), working from a script by first-timer Adam Sztykiel and veterans Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, doesn't try to reinvent the wheel and stumbles badly in a few crucial, excruciatingly false scenes -- especially the climax, one of those annoying pseudo-confrontations wherein two people face off at a public gathering while everyone else just stands around, patiently gawking.

In the wedding comedy sub-genre that includes such titles as Four Weddings and a Funeral, 27 Dresses, The Wedding Planner, Weddings Crashers, The Wedding Date, and My Best Friend's Wedding, this one's an also-ran, with a honeymoon of a first act and a divorce of a third act.

So we'll betroth 2½ stars out of 4 for a male-perspective rom-com. Made of Honor doesn't offer much in the way of originality. But, like a favorite sweet dessert you've consumed countless times, it satisfies your sweet tooth anyway.

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