The Story
Jane Nichols, played by Heigl, stars the hopeless romantic who does just about anything for anyone, while never really doing much for herself. It’s a fairly typical role, built to garner sympathy from viewers, and it works somewhat well here. As with most films in this genre, you know that characters like this are going to end up very happy; and that’s fine, you’d like to see that. It’s clichéd, but that goes for most films. Anyway, Nichols has been a bridesmaid, and often maid of honor, twenty-seven times, but has never been a bride. The whole point of the film is seeing Nichols finally get her wedding, and the many trials she goes through in this brief span of her young life to get to that point. She, at first, is head over heels in love with her boss, George, played by Edward Burns. When her sister, played by Malin Akerman, comes to town and steals away George before Jane’s very eyes, it seems like Jane is destined to never get married–even though she’s probably only in her late 20s, hardly an age to be worried about such things. Enter James Marsden’s character, Kevin Doyle, a local newspaper reporter with a broken heart and a cynical point of view towards weddings, the complete opposite of Jane’s views. Keeping in mind that opposites attract, you can start to see where this film is going, and it’s quite predictable the whole way through — but it’s still a fun watch, at least once over.
The Blu-ray Package
This release comes on a 50GB Blu-ray disc, and sports Fox’s typical DTS-HD audio track and of course, 1080p picture. The visuals are very good, but not outstanding; you’ve seen crisper and more vibrant looking blu-ray releases. It’s a little easier to forgive, at least for me, that this film isn’t outstanding visually because I really don’t plan on watching it much at all, and it’s not like there are any special effects or anything unusual going on. In terms of audio, there is nothing to write home about either. The dialogue, the most important aspect of the film, comes across very clear and well balanced though, which is what counts; the effects and soundtrack are forgettable.
In terms of extras, it’s nice that Fox included all extras, except a few minutes of deleted scenes, in HD. The unfortunate part of this is that none of the features are much more than summaries and brief making of videos that you might watch once, maybe. All told there are just over thirty minutes of extras, including these featurettes: “Jane’s World,” a cheesy five minute look at getting the filming environment of Rhode Island set, “You’ll Never Wear That Again,” is about seven minutes and revolves around the costume designer talking about the dresses used by Jane. “Running of the Brides,” is a useless extra of about five minutes featuring a particular wedding dress sale event that a certain store holds every so often. The largest extra is the fifteen minute “The Wedding Party” feature that is your typical making of shoot with cast interviews and so forth. Lastly, there are about four minutes of deleted scenes presented in SD.
