Film: Drunk Wedding
Starring: Nick P. Ross, J.R. Ramirez
Directed by: Nick Weiss

Having suffered through well over a decade of increasingly mindless found footage horror that is typically far too shaky for most audiences to thoroughly enjoy, Drunk Wedding has arrived as proof that POV filmmaking can also be funny.

If there was ever a film about a group of people wandering around a foreign place with cameras you could buy at your local department store that you could actually relate to, it’s Nick Weiss’ Drunk Wedding. Set in South America, the film follows a group of lifelong friends as they travel from North America for a destination wedding. There are no killers or monsters or spooky sequences in tents to be found anywhere in any frame. This film is all about love and comedy, though there are also one or two drunken montages along the way, and to be honest it’s as refreshing a change as any genre film could hope to be.

There is not a whole lot of plot that can be explained without giving away major reveals, but suffice to say the various cameras distributed amongst the group capture party antics, close moments between friends, couples being romantic, and all the pageantry that comes with a destination wedding. It’s a quick and mostly painless affair, though the rules of logic do go out the window once the drinks begin to flow. As long as you’re invested in the characters that fact won’t matter all that much, and it’s actually kind of impressive how well the film establishes the various people who populate this fictional world. You have the couple who has been together longer than everyone else’s longest relationship, the couple who have dated for way too long, the friends who have been around since birth, and the one awkward guy who is least known to the group (who, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also the most outrageous). Nothing in these characters is all that original, but for the purposes of this story it absolutely works.

As much as Drunk Wedding helps to expand the POV genre by proving real laughs can indeed be earned, there are some shortcomings that cannot be ignored. For instance, there is an inexplicable soundtrack to the entire film, despite being presented entirely through footage captured on home video cameras. There is also a noticeable lull in the progression of the story somewhere around the halfway point, as the narrative becomes as blurred as the vision of the drunken characters on screen. The need to highlight the act of partying in a film with a title like this one is not lost on me, but when the runtime is under 90 minutes there is no excuse for allowing the narrative to stall. The film does a fine job of balancing many stories, and even manages to create some dramatic tension, but then the bachelor/bachelorette festivities begin and all that goes out the window for a bit too long.

For the first time in a long time I feel like a new POV title may actually make people excited about the genre once again. Drunk Wedding is far from a comedy classic, but it does feature big laughs and adequate acting, which is more than the vast majority of comedic efforts released today can claim. Just sit back, turn off your brain, and enjoy the destination wedding you’ll probably never be invited to because your friends are neither as fun nor successful as those featured in this film. It’s worth your time.

GRADE: C+

Review written by: James Shotwell Follow @utgjames

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James Shotwell

James Shotwell is the founder of Under The Gun Review. He loves writing about music and movies almost as much as he loves his two fat cats. He's also the co-founder of Antique Records and the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. You should probably follow him on Twitter.

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