From Jeremy Kibler

Til Death Do Us Part is bound to get compared to Radio Silence’s 2019 game-changer Ready or Not, as well as a red-hot movie star-led blockbuster that will go unnamed for spoiler-y reasons. For the sake of this tiresome cat-and-mouse action thriller also about a bride being hunted (and that’s pretty much where the likeness begins and ends), the comparison to the former isn’t really to its benefit. 

The movie begins like a Hallmark Original without any hint for what’s to come before a bride (Natalie Burn) is about to walk down the aisle and marry her groom (Ser’Darius Blain). Well, she gets cold feet and drives to a family cabin to blow off steam. Sooner or later, her would-be husband’s groomsmen (including Orlando Jones and Cam Gigandet) come to her on a “containment mission.” Grabbing a knife as soon as she sees them outside, this bride isn’t going to be an easy one to contain, even in her wedding dress. 

It’s not like this concept couldn’t have made for a lean, mean, entertaining chase. But with an unimpressive lead performance and a lousy script hidden behind a tricksy narrative structure, the opportunities are botched. Director Timothy Woodward Jr. (The Call) gets some brutal, bloodthirsty stunts out of the scenario (a shovel and chainsaw come in handy) cued to oldies from the ‘50s, but as is, this is a seemingly interminable, blandly executed genre exercise.

Sluggish and overblown when it could have been a little more transparent, Til Death Do Us Part takes forever to get to the point. A flashback framing device does the would-be thrill of the chase a major disservice. Since we’re kept in the dark for more than half of the movie about the actual reasons The Bride wants out of her nuptials, both her and the groomsmen’s actions just come off as extreme. Piece by piece, more information is doled out, and when it’s finally revealed what is really going on, it isn’t much. Instead, the viewer must wade through a tedious honeymoon flashback in Puerto Rico where the couple meets an older couple (Jason Patric and Nicole Arlyn, giving a lot of suspicious looks). 

Aside from the structure prolonging everything, the script by writers Chad Law and Shane Dax Taylor is just needlessly talky and repetitive. There’s so much bad dialogue to go around it’s hard to choose what’s worse, the expository kind, the conversations about fishing, or the clunky attempts at insulting one-liners? For instance, “I’m gonna beat you like your daddy used to! Come on, bitch!” The banter between the other groomsmen also falls flat and just pads the running time.

Not to make this about comparing and contrasting with Ready or Not, or to be mean, but Natalie Burn is no Samara Weaving. Being a capable badass with stunt work, she acquits herself quite well with the physical challenges, but as a stealth killing machine we might as well dub “Jane Wick,” Burns expresses about as much charisma as Gina Carano. Always ready to squint and smirk, Cam Gigandet seems to be having the most fun as the most unhinged best man, who keeps bringing up the speech he wrote and getting distracted by the music playing inside the cabin. When Cam Gigandet is the fun part of your movie, one knows the rest of those two hours (!) has very little to recommend it. 

Til Death Do Us Part will hit theaters on August 4, 2022.

Rating: 1/5

Follow Jeremy at @JKiblerFilm