‘I’m all fucked up and I always will be…’
The ’90s was a great decade for films and TV shows that were essentially just a bunch of people talking to each other. This was the decade of Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. And so, it is fitting that Destination Wedding, a film that stubbornly refuses to have any kind of plot, takes two ’90s icons in the shape of Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder and has them talking at each other for 87 poisonous minutes…
When Lindsay (Ryder) and Frank (Reeves) meet on their way to a wedding in Paso Robles they bond over their mutual snarky attitude and lack of enthusiasm for the big day itself. The rest of the film is basically the two of them being ever more negative and toxic until the inevitable happens. If you’re going to have a film be just dialogue, then you need the characters to be likeable or interesting or even just to feel like they might be two actual people that could exist in the real world. Lindsay and Frank are none of those things. They are annoying, they are inauthentic and they aren’t funny (even though the film desperately wants us to think that they are). None of this is the fault of the two leads, however, they do their best with the material they are given, but even at least than 90 minutes, I was bored by the end of Destination Wedding.
Writer-director Victor Levin’s film is proof that no matter how good the actors are, you simply cannot save a bad script – an annoying and self-indulgent mess.
