Made Of Honour Review

What does this mean? Made Of Honor. I mean, I get that it's a pun - but puns are meant to convey meaning by having a play on words. I get that the story of this sorry, sorry film, is that Tom (Dempsey), a Best Friend Forever to Sally (Monaghan), is asked to be her maid of honor when she wants to get married. But really, changing maid to Made doesn't mean anything. Does it mean he is literally constructed out of honor and ethics and morals? Or does that mean he is a made man from the mafia, but follows the code of honor?

It just doesn't make any sense. Neither does the whole film. Made Of Honor is a terrible film that has one of the worst and uninspired pieces of writing I have seen in recent memory, and a lead actor who is completely out of his depth. This is a film where all cinematic cliches are all rolled into one big mess and spat on our faces at regular intervals. And we still pay Hollywood money.

Made Of Honor is another wedding themed chick flick that has been mass manufactured, like all the ones before it. What infuriates about this one in particular is the absolute lack of creativity and ambition. The makers would be just as happy merely robbing people at gunpoint, because clearly they'd just as soon not make the effort. This is never as evident as in the hackneyed and much borrowed plot.

Tom and Sally meet in college, and become best buds. 10 years later, living in New York, both spend time in snooping in antique shops and guessing dessert choices for each other. Tom is now a very rich man, and happily sleeping with multiple women every day, and discussing his conquest with his male friends. Sally goes to Scotland for work, meets Colin (McKidd), and falls in love. They decide to get married in Scotland in 2 weeks.

As is by now expected, Tom realizes he loves her, and heads to Scotland to wreck the wedding, all the while being the 'maid' of honor to Sally. Of course, in time-honored tradition, there are realizations, clandestine kisses and a rescue on horseback. Sometimes I think maybe the makers looked eastward for inspiration, from Bollywood.

No matter, this re-treading of When Harry Met Sally and My Best Friend's Wedding and even The Graduate for a small while goes through the motions as you'd expect it to, and never relents on the completely mind-numbing stupidity of it all. There are a few offensive and inappropriate jokes thrown in to keep the boys happy, I suppose, and nothing much else.

Even as factory produced chick flicks go, this one's a stinker, and as cinema, it is stuff nightmares are made of. There are umpteen such films made every year, but some at least have the decency to have a charismatic cast, or barring that, something fresh in presentation. Made Of Honor has the distinction of having nothing.

Patrick Dempsey is completely out of his depth as a womanizing lovable rogue. He has so long played the straight man in so many (and might I add, better) films, that he has completely forgotten how to be anything else. Michelle Monaghan is radiant as Sally, but there is a vacant emptiness in that smile that can only come with a quick pay-cheque role.

Add to that an uninteresting and supremely disinterested supporting cast, and the weak foundation crumbles under the burden of ham. Director Paul Weiland who was, if not the best, at least very competent director of Blackadder Back And Forth, has fallen to utter disgrace with this work of vacuous stupidity. This is an inane film, and I'd trust you to have better sense than to attempt to find out the veracity of that claim.