Grade:  D+

Director:  Garry Marshall		Released:  July 1999
Writer:  Josann McGibbon, Sara Parriott		MPAA Rating:  PG
Players:  Julia Roberts, Richard Gere		Running time:  116 minutes

Ratings System

Runaway Bride is one of those movies that if you've seen the trailer, then you've seen the movie.  The setup is that Julia Roberts runs away from the alter every time she's about to get married.  Ha ha.  Hilarious.  So Richard Gere comes along to write a story about her but gets swept up by her charms.  How unexpected!  It's all contrived and forced and rehashed from other movies, there's no point in watching it.  You know what's going to happen in the end, despite how it tries to confuse the issue.  The plotting, the setups and jokes feel very familiar.  There's nothing fresh about the movie, it's just talent wasted.  They could have spent their time making some other movie that was actually entertaining.

I find it insulting to explain away her actions as "fear of commitment".  If you are literally running away from your own wedding (multiple times) you've got much bigger problems than a simple fear of commitment.  I know this is a comedy, but there's nothing real about any of the concepts, from the small town that they might as well have named Capra, USA, to the New York City that somehow feels like the same place as the small town, except with tall buildings.  It's rubbish, I say.

- crocoPuffs