HELL'S WEDDING BELLS

REVIEWED - THE WEDDING DATE: What is it with Americans and their bizarrely extravagant weddings? Here we go again: bachelorette parties, stag dos, picnics and, as always, this thing they call a rehearsal dinner (an event specifically designed to accommodate misunderstandings in the penultimate scenes of romantic comedies), writes Donald Clarke

"Who ever heard of taking dancing lessons for a wedding?" Jack Davenport, a stupid groom, asks at one point. The rest of the cast - all indoctrinated in the ways of the vulgar nuptial - cast eyes to heaven and organise their features into well-duh grimaces. "Only everybody!" they trill. It still seems like a reasonable question to me.

The lacey indulgence is all the more conspicuous because The Wedding Date - profiting from product placement by Virgin Atlantic, a production deal with some mysterious film fund and, everyone hopes, the audience's fond recollections of various Working Title releases - takes place almost entirely in the United Kingdom.

Debra Messing, nothing but a broad smile carried about by invisible vapours, plays a nervy New York singleton whose half-sister is about to get hitched to the idiot Davenport in St Simon of Curtis's church at Dingle on the Dale. Keen to impress both her sibling and an ex-boyfriend who is acting as best man, Debra hires male escort Dermot Mulroney, a performer with the bland, asexual charm of a knitting-pattern model, to fly across the Atlantic and pose as her boyfriend.

This information is conveyed in the first five minutes of the film via an answering machine message from Mulroney and a hurried conversation between Messing and a bicycle courier. It is hard not to jump to the conclusion that these sequences have been inserted to replace discarded hunks of dramatic exposition. What remains is torpid, fatuous and (can they get to the church before some bad thing happens?) chillingly predictable.

Mulroney seems only barely awake and Messing, though less annoying than when laughing at homosexuals on Will and Grace, offers little evidence that she may yet achieve the big-screen career denied even to more talented TV contemporaries such as Jennifer Aniston.

I mean, really. How bad must the stuff they threw away have been?