Damnit. Timothy Woodward Jr’.s “Til Death Do Us Part” is a wonderful idea, one ripe for a great horror comedy with a ton of action and what we ultimately got was just… not what I was completely expecting. Granted, the movie does have a wonderful grasp on what it’s trying to do, but the delivery just felt off. It’s a movie that clocks in at almost two hours, and rather than charge in head first with the laughs and action. Instead the movie takes a lot of time, at least twenty or thirty minutes, establishing the initial storyline and back story.
After running away on her wedding day, a bride-to-be must fight for survival against her former fiancé and his seven deadly groomsmen. In the ultimate horror showdown, the groomsmen soon discover that she has no intention of going back to the life she left behind.
There’s a whole ten minutes of just exploring the romance between main characters leading us down what is utter misdirection. Only when “The Bride” begins striking at the grooms men that launch an all out assault on her does the movie actually feel like its taking shape. There’s a lot of dependence on the audience from Chad Law and Shane Dax Taylor’s script to be committed enough to follow along, and the narrative just isn’t interesting enough. I mean how do you promise such a fun premise and then spend all the run time on setting everything up? Director Woodward could easily have chopped off twenty minutes and committed to a tighter action thriller.
It would have benefited the whole movie, in the long run. For the most part, Natalia Burn as “The Bride” is fine enough, but I just didn’t care enough about her character. Meanwhile folks like Orlando Jones and Jason Patric just feel wasted and under utilized, all the while Cam Gigandet never quite carries the movie to the finish line. That said once the movie gets rolling with the action scenes, they are pretty entertaining, and it’s fascinating how they include Pancho Moler (one of my favorite genre actors) as one of the groomsmen and never resort to cheap gags with his character. Timothy Woodward Jr.’s direction sadly does a disservice to the intended action set pieces not really successfully building tension or sucking us in to the chaos.
I wish Woodward had opted for a less murky aesthetic that embraced the inherent camp and gonzo tone of the premise. “Til Death Do Us Part” should have been a slam dunk, but it’s ill-conceived, and hindered by an overlong run time, and so much padding and filler.
Now Exclusively in Theaters Nationwide.