I keep wanting to mistakenly refer to this movie as Love, Marriage, Divorce since that seems like a more prevailing plot element in this abysmal rom-com. Mandy Moore plays a couples counselor who’s a newlywed herself, having just gotten hitched with Charlie (the Twilight Saga’s Kellan Lutz). Her life is great, that is, until she learns her parents (James Brolin, Jane Seymour) are splitting up. Their pain will soon be felt by every person watching this wretched movie. Incompetently directed by actor Dermot Mulroney (My Best Friend’s Wedding), the movie’s tone approaches something like spastic cartoon. Mulroney frames everything in uncomfortable close-ups, which magnifies the exaggerated gyrations and facial expressions of his cast. It looks like every person onscreen is suffering a stroke at one point. The acting is so shockingly terrible. It’s like the actors have been replaced with the amateur dinner theater versions of themselves. Moore’s character is too shrewish and self-involved to be compelling, and Lutz, whose name rhymes with putz, is so wooden you’d swear they carved him out of a chunk of balsa right before cameras rolled. The sitcom plot suffers from every cliché imaginable in the rom-com genre. This is the worst case of bad drunk acting since 2006’s The Black Dahlia, where actors over-do just about every action. The funny part is that it’s only a slight difference from the way the characters are behaving sober. Criminally unfunny, I have only one theory how Mulroney was able to get this movie made because clearly the screenplay wasn’t reeling investors in. In the end credits are many producers and executive producers, several of them with Slavic surnames. There’s also a Slavic model with in a key role. Mulroney turned to the only people who would finance Love, Wedding, Marriage – the Russian mafia. If you see Mulroney in a wheelchair from an “accident” in the near future, you heard the truth here first.

Nate’s Grade: D-