A synthetic fairytale for the era of livestreaming and monetised oversharing, Marry Me is a musical romcom that pairs a superstar celebrity, pop queen Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez), with Charlie (Owen Wilson), a divorced maths teacher in a shapeless cardigan. They are flung together after Kat, about to marry her boyfriend in front of 20 million viewers, discovers that he has cheated on her and plucks Charlie from the audience instead, forcibly marrying him in front of his traumatised 12-year-old daughter and the whole of Instagram.
There’s something of the Notting Hill dynamic in this underpowered romance, in which the megastar, touched by the everyman appeal of her dad-joke spouting maths nerd, vacates her ivory tower to find love in the real world. It’s interesting to note that while the handsome prince in equivalent fairytales gets to retain his crown, the princess tends to be hauled down to earth. Or perhaps that’s reading too much into this silly, shallow romcom, which is as thin and predictable as Kat’s tinny pop songs.
