It’s an instant relief that Shotgun Wedding plays out like a cartoon more than anything, considering a film about a couple getting married on an island in the Philippines that comes under siege by gun-toting pirates sounds offensive on paper for several reasons.

In 2023, it’s incredibly tiring watching this brand of action movie that does nothing to provide reasonable context and motives beyond money for the foreign villains that we cheer on getting blown up and set on fire for 100 minutes. With that said, it’s forgivable if there’s enough dumb fun not to take the movie seriously at all. But considering marketing TV spots make this film come across as a bride and groom trying to survive a mass shooting (the title doesn’t help), I admittedly was prepared for the worst.

Instead, director Jason Moore (working from a script from Mark Hammer) ops for traditional romantic comedy clichés as Shotgun Wedding opens with a rehearsal evening sequence spelling out that for as much as Jennifer Lopez’s Darcy and Josh Duhamel’s Tom are in love, they have some issues to sort out that they are struggling to communicate to one another.

Tom is so fixated on ensuring the wedding is perfect (a destination wedding that Darcy seems to have reluctantly agreed to, mentioning that she would have preferred to elope) that when Darcy is posing suggestively in the bedroom the night before the wedding, he is too preoccupied to get in the mood. Darcy is filled with self-doubt regarding marriage due to her past relationship with wealthy ex-boyfriend Sean (Lenny Kravitz), whereas Tom tends to self-sabotage anything great going good in his life.