Destination Wedding (2018)
Directed by Victor Levin
Written by Victor Levin
Starring Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves
Release Date August 31st, 2018
Published August 31st, 2018
Destination Wedding stars Keanu Reeves as Frank and Winona Ryder as Lindsey, a pair of mismatched wedding guests. Frank’s brother is getting married in San Luis Obispo, a piece of information the filmmakers feel is important for us to know for some reason. Frank hates his brother and based on the evidence of the movie, he hates pretty much everyone so Frank setting aside special hatred for someone is notable.
Lindsey, meanwhile, is Frank’s brother’s ex-fiancee. She accepted an invitation to this wedding some six years after Frank’s brother dumped her on the eve of their wedding. She’s come to San Luis Obispo in search of closure and acceptance and the ability to move on with her emotional life. And, she might be insane. The movie doesn’t deal with this fact directly, but Winona Ryder plays the character with some sort of undefined mental deficiency that, perhaps, is meant to be comedy.
Frank’s main trait beyond extreme misanthropy is his habit of hocking phlegm. Yeah, this is a fun trait to give a character. Our introduction to Frank is him repeatedly and loudly attempting to clear his sinuses. It’s apparent that the movie thinks this is either charming or funny as they keep having him do it, multiple times throughout the movie. Somehow though the funny part of the hocking didn’t translate to those of us in the audience, it remains solely in the imagination of Keaun Reeves and writer-director Victor Levin.
Keanu gets off easier than poor Winona Ryder who is forced to play Lindsey as what I assume is the victim of an off-screen head injury. Our introduction to Lindsey is her breathing heavily onto a dying plant. She does this and chants ‘come on photosynthesis’ and we are supposed to laugh I suppose, rather than cringe which my body did in instinctive sympathy for an actress I have always very much liked being made to look silly in a very unfunny fashion.
Once Frank and Lindsey meet and find themselves repeatedly thrust together as the only singletons at this destination wedding, they begin to talk and immediately hate one another. The first quarter of this blessedly short 80 minute feature is Ryder and Reeves insulting one another in the most hateful and obnoxiously unfunny fashion. Imagine being trapped in a small space with a pair of obnoxiously miserable people and you get a sense of what watching Reeves and Ryder interact in Destination Wedding is like.
I’m trying hard to imagine what either of these talented people thought would come of this unfunny, genuinely mean way their characters interact in this movie. I assume they were aware they were making a romantic comedy and not the prequel to a violent revenge movie, but I can’t be sure. Dialogue that is meant to be savagely misanthropic comes off as merely faux miserable ranting from characters we can’t stand and are yet the only characters in this movie. There are no other characters, just Lindsey and Frank the whole time. It's like being trapped in an elevator with relatives you hate but are too polite to scream at.
When the love story began to unfold in Destination Wedding, I was dumbfounded that anyone thought these characters were capable of such a turn. Ryder and Reeves have established both of these hateful, obnoxious, miscreants as people who are more likely to commit murder-suicide than fall in love and yet we have to suffer listening to them bond over how they hate other people more than they hate each other so they must be good together.
As the 'romance' progresses the two have one of the worst, unfunny, funny love scenes I have ever seen. Some of the hilariously funny dialogue includes Ryder telling Reeves that he looks like he's about to vomit on her. This happens during the love scene. Eventually, the romance progresses to a genuine and earnest moment when our head injury victim, Lindsey says, without a hint of irony or sarcasm, "what if our real destination was each other?" Now, I'm the one who looks like he might vomit.
When I saw that Destination Wedding starred Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder I was sure it couldn’t be that bad. Oh how wrong I was. This is truly one of the worst movies of 2018. Even at a barely feature length 80 minutes, Destination Wedding is an unbearable disaster of a movie. Bitter, spiteful, hateful, idiotic characters pretending toward being funny misanthropes, Frank and Lindsey aren’t romantic comedy characters, they are the half-hearted offspring of screenwriters who watch half of a Judd Apatow movie and think they get the gist.
