Metacritic reviews

Quotation forthcoming.

But while that stew sounds familiar, Marry Me takes almost too long to get really cracking, with both romance and laughs in short supply, until a mercifully charming final act.

An engaging if undemanding romantic outing, newfangled enough to be social media-current, old fashioned enough to warrant bringing the whole family. Just remember to brush your teeth afterwards.

In an era in which many of Lopez’s romcom peers – namely the Witherspoons and the Bullocks – have pivoted to dark dramas, it’s lovely to see her still banging the drum for a genre that’s never earned the respect it’s deserved. Then again, she knows what that feels like.

It's all cream puff, a featherweight fairytale too shiny and mild to attempt the better movie about midlife romance and second chances that might have been.

Marry Me feels like a satirical movie that missed the joke. It doesn't have a plot as much as a collection of rom-com tropes — Fake marriage! Reverse "Notting Hill"! Evil exes! School mathalons? — and is strung together by the whisper of a narrative structure. But while "Marry Me" is silly, poorly made, and inarguably a bad movie, I had dumb fun.

I don’t know if this was due to the budget or COVID, but Marry Me feels small in ways that a big commercial rom-com frequently doesn’t and maybe that’s why you can’t fully shake the feeling that this Universal Pictures project is really just a marketing scheme cooked up to highlight Lopez’s real-life music career and some NBCUniversal properties, including the frequent cutaways to a decidedly unfunny Jimmy Fallon, which may be, ironically, the movie at its most honest.

Even with a handful of toe-tapping songs written by Maluma and JLo specifically for the film Marry Me is an off-tune rom-com that should make most viewers think twice about saying “I do.”

It’s better than nothing to mark the cheesy holiday, but the lack of effort shows.

Jennifer Lopez is radioactively humourless and Owen Wilson is robotically bland in this stinker.