The Wedding Date is a 2005 American romantic comedy film directed by Clare Kilner and starring Debra Messing, Dermot Mulroney, and Amy Adams. Based on the 2002 novel Asking for Trouble by Elizabeth Young, the film is about a single woman who hires a male escort to pose as her boyfriend at her sister's wedding in order to dupe her ex-fiancé, who dumped her a few years prior. The film was released on February 4, 2005 and grossed $47 million.
Plot
Kat Ellis is a single New Yorker who returns to her parents' house in London to be the maid of honor at her younger half-sister Amy's wedding. The best man is her former fiancé, who unexpectedly dumped her two years ago. Anxious about confronting and eager to impress him, she hires suave escort Nick Mercer to pose as her boyfriend.
Kat intends to make her former flame, Jeffrey, jealous, but her plan backfires when Nick convinces everyone, including her, that they are madly in love. Kat then feels herself, too, falling for Nick as he slowly falls for her.
The night before the wedding, Kat discovers Amy slept with Jeffrey when they were still together, and he dumped her because he believed he was in love with Amy. Nick had discovered this a day earlier, and when Kat finds that out, she feels betrayed from all sides, and puts Nick off. He decides to return to America, and leaves Kat the money she had paid him.
On the wedding day, seeing Kat distressed, her step-father asks her if Nick 'is the guy for you'. Kat realizes he is, so she sets off to find him. Meanwhile, just before the wedding ceremony, Amy confesses her betrayal to her fiancé, Ed, but professes her love for him.
Upset, Ed chases Jeffrey out of the church and down the road. Jeffrey insists he gave up on Amy and believes he's done nothing wrong. To which Ed calls him a "back-stabbing weasel", though Jeffrey believes he's still not in the wrong as he slept with Amy before she and Ed dated. Ed shouts out that Jeffrey was engaged to Kat, proving he was still in the wrong for what he did to Kat.
Nick picks up Ed in a car as Jeffrey disappears into the woods. They talk about love, and Ed decides he loves Amy more than he is angry. To make it clearer he should go back, Nick tells Ed if he returned, the couple would end up having great makeup sex. They return to the church, with Nick as the 'new' best man. Just before the ceremony, Nick tells Kat he realized he'd "... rather fight with you than make love with anyone else", and they kiss passionately.
Kat and Nick begin a real relationship, and he gives up his job. Amy and Kat reconcile. TJ, Kat's cousin, also apparently enjoys a moment with Woody after the wedding. Jeffrey learns absolutely nothing, and at the end is seen trying to get the attention of a female neighbor.
The Wedding Date grossed $31.7million in the United States and Canada, and $15.4million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $47.2million.[1]
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 11% based on 142 reviews, with an average rating of 3.9/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Critics are leaving The Wedding Date at the altar, calling it shopworn, bland, and lightweight."[4] On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 32 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[5] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[6]
