Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson in ‘Marry Me’: Film Review (2024)

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? ButMarry 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 farenough 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.