marry me jennifer lopez movie review

Cast & crew
User reviews

Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, and Maluma in Marry Me (2022)

Music superstars Kat Valdez and Bastian are getting married before a global audience of fans. But when Kat learns, seconds before her vows, that Bastian has been unfaithful, she instead deci... Read all Music superstars Kat Valdez and Bastian are getting married before a global audience of fans. But when Kat learns, seconds before her vows, that Bastian has been unfaithful, she instead decides to marry Charlie, a stranger in the crowd. Music superstars Kat Valdez and Bastian are getting married before a global audience of fans. But when Kat learns, seconds before her vows, that Bastian has been unfaithful, she instead decides to marry Charlie, a stranger in the crowd.

John Rogers
Tami Sagher
Harper Dill
Jennifer Lopez
Owen Wilson
530 User reviews
181 Critic reviews
51 Metascore
2 wins & 4 nominations

Top cast 99+

Not George (Spencer)

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

Trivia Jennifer Lopez 's son Max Muñiz makes his film debut in this movie, as a student at the Mathalon competition.
Goofs Kat's manager Colin tells her that he'll get Charlie to sign an NDA to undo the wedding. That would do nothing towards canceling the marriage; what he really needs is an annulment.

Charlie : Is this smart?

Kat : I think we left smart six weeks ago.

Crazy credits The closing credits contains a series of couples and the stories on how they met.
Connections Featured in Jennifer Lopez: On My Way (Lyric Version) (2021)
Soundtracks Marry Me (Kat & Bastian Duet) Written by Michael Pollack , Nick Sarazen (as Nicholas Sarazen), Livvi Franc (as Olivia Waithe), Maluma (as Juan Luis Londoño Arias), Edgar Barrera , Stefan Johnson , Jordan Johnson , German (as Oliver Peterhof) Produced by Monsters & Strangerz , Michael Pollack , Nick Sarazen Maluma appears courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment U.S. Latin LLC

User reviews 530

A really great cheesy romcom.

martimusross
Feb 9, 2022
How long is Marry Me? Powered by Alexa
February 11, 2022 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Official Instagram
Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, USA (The scene overlooking the water the morning after Kat and Charlie spend the night together for the first time.)
Universal Pictures
Kung Fu Monkey Productions
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$23,000,000 (estimated)
$22,438,180
Feb 13, 2022
$50,541,093
Runtime 1 hour 52 minutes
Dolby Digital

More to explore

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Jennifer lopez and owen wilson in ‘marry me’: film review.

A pop singer impulsively marries a stranger after discovering that her fiancé has been cheating on her in this romantic comedy directed by Kat Coiro.

By Angie Han

Television Critic

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Send an Email
Show additional share options
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest
Share on Reddit
Share on Tumblr
Share on Whats App
Print the Article
Post a Comment

Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson in 'Marry Me'

Pretty early in Marry Me , a character makes the point that the romance we’re watching unfold, between global pop sensation Kat Valdez ( Jennifer Lopez ) and regular guy Charlie Gilbert ( Owen Wilson ), is no fairy tale. Kat’s just-broken engagement to fellow superstar Bastian ( Maluma ) — that was the fairy tale. What Kat and Charlie have is something else, maybe something realer and more grounded.

This is ridiculous, of course. The whole point of Marry Me is that it’s a fairy tale. How else to describe a love story that begins with Kat dumping her cheating fiancé at the livestreamed concert that was to be their wedding, picking total stranger Charlie out of the crowd to marry instead and then falling for him in spite of herself? But Marry Me is clever enough to know that the insistence otherwise is part of the dance, too, and it builds its central relationship around chemistry just sweet and sincere enough to make us eagerly buy into it for 112 minutes.

Marry Me is a big, frothy studio rom-com of the sort Lopez used to headline 20 years ago — or perhaps more accurately, of the sort Julia Roberts used to headline before that, since the plot is basically Notting Hill with the odd Pretty Woman reference. There are meet-cutes and grand romantic gestures, a funny best friend (Charlie’s coworker Parker, played by Sarah Silverman) and an adorable moppet (Charlie’s daughter Lou, played by Chloe Coleman). The stars are gorgeous, the outfits are glamorous and the real estate is enviable — even Charlie, a high school math teacher, enjoys an implausibly spacious New York City apartment — and director Kat Coiro captures it all with the high-gloss polish that big-city dreams are made of.

Coming in an era when rom-com films seem more often than not to take the form of subversions , genre hybrids or bittersweet dramedies , Marry Me ‘s old-fashioned romanticism feels in some ways like a throwback. Yet it does not feel stale, because Marry Me demonstrates a shrewd understanding of the way modern celebrity operates, and in particular of the way Lopez’s does. Kat blends so seamlessly with Lopez’s own career and image that Marry Me essentially doubles as an excuse for Lopez and Maluma to release a joint album for their existing fanbases. Lady Gaga stripping back for A Star Is Born , this is not.

To suggest Lopez is simply playing herself would not be giving her enough credit for how effortlessly she commands the screen as Kat, whether she’s addressing a jam-packed arena or relaxing at Charlie’s in one of his old shirts. But the character fits Lopez almost as snugly as the bejeweled bodysuits Kat wears onstage. Glimpses into Kat’s life backstage — the swarms of paparazzi, the bustling entourage, the endless schedule of promos and interviews — are close enough to what we know of Lopez’s own reality to feel like a taste of her life, albeit one that takes a very light touch with its harder or more mundane aspects. (Getting too real would ruin the fun, after all.) Ditto Kat’s optimistic views on love, despite her very high-profile string of rocky romances.

And make no mistake — Marry Me is the Kat show. While the script (by John Rogers & Tami Sagher and Harper Hill) takes pains to give Charlie a life of his own, mainly revolving around Lou and his high school “math-a-lon” team, it is Kat’s world that Charlie enters, and not the other way around. Even when she stops by his classroom or meets his friends, she’s the one able to turn an ordinary school day into a once-in-a-lifetime event simply by showing up.

Occasionally, Marry Me take a halfhearted stab at feminist messaging, as in a press conference where Charlie offers a primer on the historically transactional nature of marriage, and Kat declares that from now on, “We [women] pick the guy, we keep our name, and let him earn the right to stay.”

Mostly, though, it’s content to just sit back and let J.Lo be J.Lo — sorry, to let Kat be Kat — and enjoy falling in like, and then love, with Charlie. In the deceptively challenging role of a dude who’s somehow both so ordinary that his ordinariness is a fundamental aspect of his appeal, and yet special enough to deserve a woman as singular as Kat, Wilson leans into a down-to-earth sense of decency. He’s the kind of guy who’ll say goodbye to Kat on the phone by telling her to call if she gets lonely, and then pick up with a smile when she takes him up on the offer barely seconds later.

Though Kat and Charlie first connect through a wild act of impulse, Marry Me allows the relationship itself to build organically, one public engagement or private conversation at a time. The chemistry that develops is not the giddy intensity of first love, but the warm, steady glow of two people who’ve been around the block enough times to recognize when they’ve found a rare and good thing.

If anything, Marry Me may not go far enough in embracing the absurdity of its initial premise; those hoping the film might push the genre to its most extravagant limits may be surprised at how (relatively) low-key their love story ends up being. But sometimes that’s the most pleasurable kind of fairy tale — one so close to convincing, you can forget for a spell that it’s all just a dream.

Full credits

Distributor: Universal Pictures Production companies: Perfect World Pictures, Nuyorican Productions, Kung Fu Monkey Productions Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Maluma, John Bradley, Chloe Coleman, Sarah Silverman, Michelle Buteau Director: Kat Coiro Screenwriter: John Rogers, Tami Sagher, Harper Dill, based on the graphic novel by Bobby Crosby Producers: Jennifer Lopez, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, John Rogers, Benny Medina Executive producers: Alex Brown, Willie Mercer, Pamela Thur, J.B. Roberts Director of photography: Florian Ballhaus Production designer: Jane Musky Costume designer: Caroline Duncan Editors: Michael Berenbaum, Peter Deschner Composer: John Debney Casting director: Leslie Woo, Julie Tucker, Ross Meyerson

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Governors awards: oscar hopefuls pack room as bond producers, richard curtis, juliet taylor and the late quincy jones are honored, pierce brosnan on becoming a 92-year-old vet for ‘last rifleman’ and the latest about ‘mamma mia 3’, does the length of a festival standing ovation really matter, hollywood flashback: ‘the cardinal’ drew high praise at the golden globes in 1964, hollywood flashback: how oliver stone made ‘alexander’ not so great, if you thought demi moore’s transformation was crazy in ‘the substance,’ wait til you hear how they did it.

Supported by

‘Marry Me’ Review: Putting ‘I Do’ on the To-Do List

As a pop star who weds a math teacher in a stunt wedding, Jennifer Lopez is all business. But the original songs shine.

Share full article

‘Marry Me’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director kat coiro narrates a sequence from her film featuring jennifer lopez, owen wilson and maluma..

“Hi. I’m Kat Coiro, and I’m the director of Marry Me. At this point in the story, Kat Valdez, played by Jennifer Lopez, and Charlie Gilbert, played by Owen Wilson, have come together and had some really beautiful moments together, developed an intimacy and a closeness that they’re both feeling pretty good about when Bastian, played by Maluma, approaches Kat about playing at Madison Square Garden, and not playing just any song but playing a ballad version of ‘Marry Me,’ which is the song that they were going to play at their original public wedding. Charlie is very supportive of Kat and her career and wants to support her, but at the same time, he’s terrified at the idea of her and Bastian doing something that’s going to bring them very close.” “Crowd’s going bananas.” “I know.” “Well, I wouldn’t say bananas, but—” [MUSIC PLAYING] “(SINGING) I’d never seen forever. I’d never seen forever in the world. But now I’m looking down. I’m looking in inside.” “It was really important to me in this scene that it be the biggest event of the film, just from a spectacular point of view. We’ve spent all these little quiet, intimate moments with Kat— JLo— and Charlie— Owen— and now her big, gigantic, superstar life is rushing back into that world.” “(SINGING) Marry me. Marry me. Say yes. Marry me. Marry me. Say yes.” “And so having her rise up out of the floor onto the stage in front of 20,000 real fans was really important for just making Charlie feel like he could never be a part of that world, like he doesn’t fit in in an elemental way.” “(SINGING) They never— no, they never. This forever, ever, ever, ever, ever. And nobody do it better, better, better.” “We were shooting the film on a budget, and we did not have within our means the ability to shoot in a big arena. And it just so happened that Maluma was doing a concert at Madison Square Garden during the week of our prep for the film, and so we worked with his team and asked if we could basically piggyback on his concert to make this sequence come together. So the way it ended up working was while they were loading in, we took our cameras and went into the empty Madison Square Garden and filmed Jennifer and Maluma performing the song. And then when his concert went underway, at one point in the middle, you know, he put on his Bastian costume, and we had Jennifer rise up out of the stage, and we had our steadicams on the stage with her. We had all our cameras in the audience. And so when you watch the film and you see the audience reacting, that is Maluma’s actual audience reacting to Jennifer’s surprising them. And we did it three times. Then they actually launched into a song together that was similar tempowise and similar choreographywise but was an existing song because we obviously couldn’t leak our song that early on. And so we filmed them singing this other song, and so we were able to use a combination of both what we filmed before the concert started and what we filmed during the concert.” [VOCALIZING] [APPLAUSE]

By Wesley Morris

Rarely are romantic comedies titled more desperately than “Marry Me.” There is something pleasing about the bluntness. And because it’s a command that involves Jennifer Lopez, we’re permitted to skate atop the movie’s despair. But the ice is thin. Lopez has rarely stayed emotionally still long enough to luxuriate in moods less emphatic than “I will” and “I do.” Her comedies argue for restlessness as a quest for true stability: The right man soothes her nerves, dispels her doubts, restores her worth. But none of those movies has been as point-blank as this new one, whose original source is a punky graphic novel .

The pop star she’s playing, Kat Valdez, has agreed to a stunt wedding during a live concert (and before a presumed online audience of 20 million) with her pop star boyfriend, Bastian. Within minutes of the ceremony, Kat discovers that he’s been messing around with one of her assistants but she decides to wed someone and picks the divorced dad (Owen Wilson) holding a “marry me” sign in the crowd. Lopez performs this choice so lifelessly yet with such automatic determination that it’s fair to classify the sign as a cue card.

This brand-new relationship is Kat’s way of mourning her suddenly old one. Introspection and grief never cross her mind. “Why do I pick the wrong guy?” is as inward as things get. Amazingly, the next day, she endorses sticking with the brand logic of the marriage while doing yoga in her soulless high-rise home. She couldn’t have selected a blander, less objectionable stranger for a husband than Charlie Gilbert. He teaches middle-school math, co-parents one of those only-in-a-movie preteens (she’s spunky yet unsure of herself) and speaks in Wilson’s drawling whine.

Charlie dislikes the demands of Kat’s celebrity. “Her entire life is sponsored,” he cries, upon watching her shoot a post for Vitamix. But he concedes to the arrangement because, it seems, the daughter (Chloe Coleman), a big Kat Valdez fan, will finally believe her dad likes fun. He never sits her down to talk about fun’s downsides. Does she know why he and her mom aren’t together? How aware is she that Kat’s been married three other times and that one of those marriages lasted for two days? It doesn’t matter because this movie vows to satisfy all involved parties.

Does “involved” include me? I just kept counting the missed opportunities. Once, at about the halfway point, Charlie bets Kat that she can’t give up her accouterments of affluence and live like, say, Jenny from the block . Yet what Kat requests in exchange is so … puny — for Charlie to open some social media accounts — that I hurt for her imagination. (That’s his daughter’s version of proof of life.) There’s a movie in that premise, nonetheless. Maybe even some stakes: Kat may yet discover where she keeps the wine glasses and how to properly use a Vitamix (they’re called lids, Kat.) And, online, Charlie might meet a woman who dreams of even more for him. And hopefully, Lopez would play her, too.

She has her moments as Kat. They’re mostly physical: mincing down a school hallway in formfitting, scarlet couture under a parka; uttering the word “Peoria” then appearing there, as if the mother ship abandoned her. Here is a star who’s been performing for so long that performance is all, as an actor, she knows. If Kat isn’t teaching Charlie’s math students how to dance in order to calm their pre-competition jitters, she’s luring them into singing one of her hits at a school formal. This is Lopez’s best mode, and she’s always known it.

But rather than indulge her stardom and its candy shell, the movie, which Kat Coiro directed from a screenplay credited to three writers, seems to apologize for them. Kat wishes for a kind of pedestrian normalcy, a common prayer of princesses in everything from the delight of “ Roman Holiday ” and “Notting Hill” to the despondence of “ Beyond the Lights ” and “Spencer.” “Marry Me,” though, has an awkward, translucent ply. Kat’s discography includes a catchy convolution whose chorus is “I am the love of, the love of my life.”

So many parallels exist between Lopez’s character and what, in reality, we know Lopez has withstood that the movie all but doubles as one of those brand-burnishing docu-selfies, right down to a crowd-pleasing retreat into the arms of a white suitor after someone charismatic and brown has let her down. The Colombian singer Maluma plays Bastian; he’s a bag of cuddles here, masquerading as a red flag. At some point, Kat even notes that she’s never been nominated for anything. (The happiest we see her in the whole movie is on Grammy nomination day.)

The original songs are the best things in the movie. Those, and the two or three scenes in which Sarah Silverman — as Charlie’s sidekick and, somehow, a school guidance counselor — appears to abandon a script that it pained me to watch her obey. The pain extends to Lopez. I spend her movies waiting for the moments in which she seems most relaxed and least forced, when the effort has fallen away and the person she’s playing is free to do and be and feel. “Marry Me” is a sad tale that’s too busy leaping from plot point to plot point for Lopez to express anything close to real. It tells a lot and shows nothing.

I keep referring to her and Kat as entertainers, which, of course, they are. But what Lopez performs here — what she’s frequently performing — is the business of entertainment. She’s the star as executive, and all she often lets us see is execution. (Kat’s truest friend is her manager, an efficient Englishman, whom John Bradley plays with persuasive concern.) Kat and Charlie don’t meet much of each other’s families. And the movie denies them any chance to explore the weirdness of this relationship. He’s something Kat must do — although not carnally, never that; we just get a morning after in which she’s long removed herself from his bed and is taking work calls. Which is fine. But don’t call this love when all we see is task management.

Marry Me Rated PG-13. Kisses, cunning, backup dancers in body suits with nuns’ habits. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters and streaming on Peacock .

Wesley Morris is a critic at large and the co-host, with Jenna Wortham, of the culture podcast “Still Processing.” He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for criticism, including in 2021 for a set of essays that explored the intersection of race and pop culture. More about Wesley Morris

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

A Tearful Talk : Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, the stars of the new movie “Wicked,” reflected on their long ride together , getting through Covid and the actors’ strike, and avoiding “playing to the green.”

Capturing America : As the wildly popular TV western “Yellowstone” prepares to air its final episodes, we look at four ways it seized the country’s attention .

Recreating War-Torn London : “Blitz,” Steve McQueen’s latest film, set in 1940 during Germany’s bombardment of the British capital, draws extensively from wartime photos .

Streaming Guides: If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime and Hulu to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Watching Newsletter: Sign up to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.