Til death do they part.
Shotgun Wedding is a 2023 romantic action comedy film directed by Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect) and starring Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Lenny Kravitz, Cheech Marin, Sônia Braga, D'Arcy Carden, and Jennifer Coolidge. It premiered on Prime Video on January 27, 2023.
The film follows a bride and groom who find themselves developing cold feet on the days of their wedding… just before a gang of masked mercenaries take their guests hostage for unknown reasons.
Not to be confused with the trope Shotgun Wedding, which is not featured in the film.
Previews: Trailer
Shotgun Wedding includes examples of:
- Action Survivor: Tom and Darcy (a baseball player and lawyer respectively) don't have any combat experience whatsoever, but they're able to take down and kill several of the mercenaries with varying degrees of effectiveness.
- Actor Allusion:
- Jennifer Lopez sings a few bars during the end credits.
- Jessica Coolidge once again picks up a firearm to protect herself against attackers in a supposedly idyllic vacation spot. Although fewer people are harmed, it ends much better for her.
- Afraid of Blood: Darcy is terrified of blood and has to look up to the sky to avoid passing out when she sees that a large amount of blood is coming out of the first pirate they kill, and much later when she and Tom are able to get the plastic cuffs they've been tied up with off of them, she faints upon seeing that Tom is bleeding after he gets wounded in the hand.
- Advertising by Association: The trailer proclaims this film is “From the director of Pitch Perfect and the producer of The Proposal”.
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: From both sides of the aisle no less. Carol is the one regularly Saying Too Much, with her husband the closest to an Only Sane Man, while Darcy's parents are still in a bitter separation when the father went and brought his girlfriend along.
- Beta Couple: Tom's best man Ricky has a one-night stand with Darcy's sister Jamie the night before the wedding and it's heavily implied that they've become a couple by the end.
- Beware the Silly Ones: Robert's new girlfriend Harriet is apparently a massive Granola Girl who knows about auras and therapeutic massage - she's not only Sean's co-conspirator, her knowledge of nerve centers lets her immobilise the mercenary leader when he tries to break the deal with Sean.
- Big Bad: Sean hired the crew of mercenaries to take all of the wedding guests hostage so that he could get $45 million of Robert's money.
- Cape Snag: Tom and Darcy manage to flee their captors and hop off the golf cart they were being hauled off in, only for the wedding dress to get stuck in the back wheel. While it's heading off a cliff.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- As the action begins, Darcy asks Tom to hold a wad of expensive fake hair for her. In the final battle, Tom uses the hair to zipline down a kiteboard he and Sean, the Big Bad, are stuck on.
- Carol gifts the young couple their "something borrowed", a proper metal cake knife - after Tom makes it down the zipline, he and Darcy promptly cut the line with it, letting Sean collide with the helicopter pursuing them.
- During their rehearsal, Darcy tells Tom about "kutak kak ci", a Balinese insult that loosely translates to "fuck your grandpa". Upon realizing that the pirates are not Filipino, Tom whispers that same insult to one of them, using the pirate's angered reaction as proof that they're Balinese and that Sean hired them.
- Larry's habit of obsessively recording everything comes in handy when he reveals that he got some video footage of Sean and Harriett making out after the rehearsal dinner, revealing that she was in on his plan from the very start.
- The Creative Closing Credits were apparently shot on Larry's camcorder as well.
- Chekhov's Skill: Tom is a pro baseball player who ended up dropped from his team, but he's still good enough to bat a grenade at a mercenary over 50 feet away.
- The Coats Are Off: Played for laughs when Tom rips off his suit jacket in the buildup to the final confrontation - except that the sleeve is still buttoned to one arm, and his efforts to fling it off send it into Darcy's face.
- Control Freak: Tom is actually referred to as the "groomzilla" early on, and it's revealed later that this paranoia has followed him around for much of his life, and may have attributed to his own baseball team dropping him. It's also the source of Darcy's own misgivings about the marriage.
- Deadmans Switch: One mercenary attempts to grenade Darcy and Tom, but they manage to grab the grenade first... unfortunately, the pin is already out. Darcy finally gets rid of it by air-bombing it on two other mercenaries.
- "Die Hard" on an X: Basically Die Hard at a wedding: a group of Ruthless Modern Pirates hijack a wedding and take all the guests hostage, and it's up to the bride and groom to save everyone before any of their loved ones gets hurt.
- Epic Fail: Tom and Darcy's individual attempts to rescue their loved ones from the resort pool both fail due to being done in haste and with little planning. Fitting for the theme of the film, they only succeed by working together.
- Faceless Mooks: All of the mercenaries have masks in an array of garish designs. One even looks like it's chainmail made entirely from soda can rings. This was likely done by them to obfuscate how none of them are Filipino.
- Gaslighting: Invoked for laughs when Renata calls Alice out on wearing a white dress for the wedding.Alice: Okay I didn't know that was like a rule!Carol: Yes you did. You're a gaslighter.
- Helicopter Blender: Sean dies this way when his parachute gets caught in his helicopter, which in turn kills Harriet when the helicopter crashes into the ocean. In a break from the usual, the actual shredding is not from the main rotor, but from said person being flung into the tail rotor.
- I Know Madden Kombat: Tom learned about how grenades work from video games. The same video games that never bring up how to un-jam a gun.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: The stress of the wedding leads Darcy to slide back into alcoholism before the midpoint of the movie.Waiter: (when she grabs a scotch glass) Someone just left that in the bathroom...
- It Gets Easier: Neither Tom nor Darcy wants to hurt anyone, and they subdue pirates when they can, but the weight of killing the villains gradually lightens over the course of the film.Tom: (out of breath) I feel horrible. But excited. You know. Like happy. Like I'm going to shit my pants, you know, but in a good way.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Darcy successfully gets a grenade to threaten the last two mercenaries with. One of them wisely gives up on the spot. The other tries to flee and shoot at her, and ends up getting the grenade.
- Lampshade Hanging: When Tom and Darcy have to fend off the first of the mercenaries, they end up getting into an argument about how complex an Indy Ploy should be considering the circumstances.
- Mama Bear: Carol finally decides that enough is enough, grabbing an AR to defend her family.Carol: No one FUCKS with my family!
- Moody Trailer Cover Song: A dramatic remix of Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” plays over the second, more action-packed half of the trailer.
- Muscles Are Meaningful: Sean's muscular and athletic physique is brought up often, and makes him a powerful obstacle for the protagonists once he's outed as the villain. Notably, he comes out on top each time Tom tries to fight him personally.
- Never Heard That One Before: While Tom is a baseball player, we just get the one baseball joke in the last third of the movie.
- Sean: Looks like someone's not making it to the big leagues!
Tom: Hah! Never heard that one before.
Sean: I know!
- Pin-Pulling Teeth: Darcy does this with the second grenade she gets her hands on, despite having both hands free this time.
- Ruthless Foreign Gangsters: The pirate mercenaries turn out to be Balinese and are more ruthless than the local Filipino pirates, who only looted the resort for twenty minutes the previous summer instead of holding everyone hostage and demanding ransom money.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the things Tom and Darcy wanted to do for their wedding was fill lanterns with movie quotes, one of them being "Be excellent to each other."
- Renata brings up how Carol "tried to start a singalong to South Pacific".
- Skewed Priorities: Carol frequently gets called out on Comically Missing the Point during the hostage situation, which she defends by saying "I'm a mother, I can worry about a lot of things at the same time."
- Taking You with Me: When one mercenary gets clotheslined into submission by Tom and Darcy, his next move is to use a grenade on them when they're ten feet away. (Grenades can be lethal at thirty!) It's either this trope or really bad thinking.
- Too Dumb to Live: Carol (Jennifer Coolidge) has this stupid habit of outing Robert (Cheech Marin) to the mercenaries any time they ask for him. And that's before we learn that he's the real target.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee:
- Darcy cooks up the idea to bum a cig off the mercenaries and then using it to set one of them on fire entirely on her own. It works a little too well.
- They have better luck with this later, when they convince the mercenaries to let them finish the wedding ceremony... and use the opportunity to bum rush them. This even extends to Robert agreeing to the mercenaries' demands, Carol deliberately leading all the guests into singing "I'll Be", and even Margy can tell shit is about to go down.
- While Tom and Darcy presumably do have time to plan how to nail the last mercenary guarding the dock, the entire sequence, involving Wounded Gazelle Gambit for good measure, is done without dialogue.
- Wedding Smashers: As shown in the trailer, the wedding is interrupted by, of all things, a crack team of mercenaries.
