Shotgun Wedding (2022)

Shotgun Wedding arrives as a destination-wedding romp in which Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel bicker, dodge pirates, and eventually bat a live grenade into the rotor blades of a helicopter. The film has no interest in instructing anyone about anything, and that restraint is its most distinguishing feature. The ransom is $45 million, the villain is a spurned ex-fiancé with a yacht and a grudge, and the moral universe extends no further than the question of whether two attractive people should say their vows. Greed is punished because greed is rude, not because the screenplay has read any theory.

The ensemble is diverse in a manner that feels organically assembled. A Latina lead, a Black former fiancé, Brazilian and Mexican-American in-laws, a Philippine island setting: all present, none announced. The film never pauses to congratulate itself, which in the current climate is nearly avant-garde. Lopez's Darcy fights, throws the grenade, and drives the escape boat, while Tom's mother picks up a rifle and returns fire. Modest empowerment, delivered inside a conventional frame. Nobody delivers a speech about it.

The cupboards elsewhere are bare. No environmental subtext, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent subplot, no queer presence, no revisionist reframing of the historical record. Race exists as casting, not as argument. The closest thing to a thesis is that wealthy fathers should probably pay the ransom sooner. This is a hundred-minute exercise in escapism that treats its own diversity as unremarkable and its own politics as nonexistent. In an era of sermonizing blockbusters, that reads as either refreshing or simply empty. The distinction may not matter. It is a January movie, and it knows it.