Based on the 2006 French film Mon Frère Se Marie, Justin Zackham’s The Big Wedding is a huge misfire that squanders its collection of stars on cardboard-thin caricatures and tone-deaf comedy, while daring to try and wring unearned emotional pathos from ridiculous set-ups free of any recognisably human interactions…
The Duplass brothers’ fourth feature length effort opens with its protagonist Jeff (Jason Segel), wielding a voice recorder, discussing how rewarding he finds M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. Heavily relating to that film’s themes of fate and purpose, Jeff also expresses admiration for how various seemingly superfluous elements in its narrative come together to provide a particularly potent conclusion. Jeff, Who Lives at Home has something of a similar narrative structure to the way its lead describes Signs, with fate and purpose being particularly prominent concerns, and various seemingly unrelated elements cumulating and crossing paths in the film’s finale. The result, however, is not quite so strong…
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