SummaryIn a last-ditch effort to save his tarnished career, a big-city reporter (Gere) chases a scoop about a mercurial, small-town girl (Roberts) known as the Runaway Bride due to her habit of leaving her grooms-to-be at the altar.
SummaryIn a last-ditch effort to save his tarnished career, a big-city reporter (Gere) chases a scoop about a mercurial, small-town girl (Roberts) known as the Runaway Bride due to her habit of leaving her grooms-to-be at the altar.
A shiny bauble full of dead weight, gloppy good feeling and airless cliches. And every time you try to grab onto "Bride's" characters, they run away. [30 July 1999]
It doesn't generate enough laughs to make up for the fact that you never figure out what he (a misogynistic USA Today columnist played by Richard Gere) sees in her (a dizzy small-town hairdresser played by Roberts). Or, for that matter, what she could ever see in him.
In "Pretty Woman" Roberts played a tough whore with a soft heart. Here, she's a business owner whose sense of self is so tenuous she doesn't even know how she likes her eggs done.
In real life, Julia Roberts canceled her own wedding to Kiefer Sutherland only a few days before the ceremony in 1991. They met on the set of the thriller Flatliners in 1990.
Even when they slow dance after being with the audience for a while, I didn't see any spark.
Runaway Bride
The director Gary Marshall, I think, didn't see this coming. And I know no one presumes the film to perform bad. But there is a certain level of expectations, a ballpark figure, a certain range that it would cover. This is a total disaster. And to be honest I can see what could be the birth of this idiosyncratic idea that it plants so proudly in this farm. But as I have always said an idea isn't everything. At least we can agree in this show business by now is that no idea is stupid. The depiction of a smart idea done poorly comes off stupid.
And no matter how stupid an idea, if executed carefully, we have seen such films turn classic instantly, take MASH for example- the Donald Sutherland one. But if a stupid idea is project stupidly, it's a stupid film, in capitals; just as stupid as using this word these many times. Still I'd like to defend the film. And you can only do it with Julia Roberts, its finest asset colored totally lazy in the film. The film's actual odd and even contradicting nature comes because of her character and still there is a lot to explore there.
That is of course, not to say that the storyline in any manner justifies the decisions of the film. But for a brief period, her character shows us something profoundly mirroring to what our society whips us with religiously. And when that note, which is either rushed on questionably or the makers were not aware of the magnitude of its brilliance, hits the screen there is a comforting realization and surprise in our face that a film of this genre usually does not offer us. Runaway Bride is still a forgettable date movie, I mean I can't even promisingly say that there is some chemistry.