‘The Wedding Guest’ a thin thriller

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This image released by IFC Films shows Dev Patel in a scene from ‘The Wedding Guest’. (AP)

Great acting and electric footage in Winterbottom’s latest

No one going to see “The Wedding Guest” should expect a rom-com. The always-likable Dev Patel does star in it as a hunky guy who travels to a wedding party but he’s not been invited and he really ruins the wedding.

That’s because he’s brought along not a tasteful 10-piece bakeware set as a gift for the happy couple but duct tape, fake passports, some guns and zip ties. His hope is to put the bride in his trunk.

Michael Winterbottom, the director of “24 Hour Party People” and “A Mighty Heart”, has channeled Quentin Tarantino for his latest, a sparse and often quiet love story set against some of the most crowded spots in Pakistan and India.

The poster for the film is a little misleading, with Patel in full menacing mode beside an ominous looking fire (look close: Is that a body?). There is violence onscreen, but this is not “Reservoir Dogs”. The trailer also pumps up the thriller aspect of the film but it’s much slower than that.

“The Wedding Guest” has actually got a thin story, but one saved by great acting and electric footage, from the rooftops in Amritsar to the crowded streets of Jaipur, as our heroine and hero travel through India, which we are told is “the perfect place to get lost.”

Patel (“Slumdog Millionaire” and “Lion”) plays a mysterious guy named Jay who goes to Pakistan from the United Kingdom to kidnap bride-to-be Samira (a riveting Radhika Apte).

But things don’t go according to plan and the kidnapping plot quickly unravels, forcing Jay and Samira, now weirdly teammates, to scramble. Will they become something more than captive and mercenary? Will her family and the police catch up to them?

Winterbottom’s script is maddeningly thin on backstory or any revealing dialogue. We never learn why Jay is so proficient with weapons and SIM cards or what he thinks about really anything. We never learn much about Samira, either, or plumb the depths of her unhappiness.

Winterbottom seems to want us to see them just as they are now, rushing from Mumbai to Delhi to Goa, taking cars, trains, mopeds and buses. Many scenes are silent or contain just a few words. (“We have to go”, is barked multiple times.) It is a film that requires careful watching to try to unlock the body language and determine if there is a double-cross or a romance brewing.

Patel and Apte have a slow-burning chemistry. Their characters didn’t exactly meet-cute – remember the zip ties and duct tape? – and rushing from hotel room to bus stations isn’t exactly conducive to emotional connection. Above all, they are smooth, cool, resourceful and unruffled.

Proven

Winterbottom has proven very adept at road pictures – “The Trip”, ‘’The Trip to Italy”, ‘’The Trip to Spain” and “On the Road” – and you might be forgiven this time for believing he’s less interested in Patel and Apte than in celebrating the colors, sounds and hustle of the streets of India. The soundtrack includes Desi tunes by DJ Vips, DJ Raj and DJ Harpz.

So “The Wedding Guest” might not completely work as a thriller or a satisfying romance, but for anyone missing India or planning to go, it’s a film worth getting lost in.

“The Wedding Guest” turns out to be the story of a professional, played by Patel but of the sort usually embodied by white men with square jaws and power-drill stares, who is contracted to kidnap a woman on the eve of her arranged marriage and deliver her to the man she loves. But Winterbottom, as globe-trotting and genre-defying a filmmaker as they come, shows only limited interest in telling that kind of movie, leveraging unconventional settings, actors, and techniques to overturn what we expect from such a plot.

 So, while “The Wedding Guest” assumes the superficial aspects of an action movie, it is in fact a far subtler enterprise at its core: In its attention to the gender dynamics and subtle power games underlying such a premise, the film plays out like Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly” with guns, providing an edgier (if ultimately less effective) take on how a woman betrothed to a man she doesn’t love manages to disappear. Beneath the surface – and the somewhat artificial suspense of whether Apte’s character will run off with Patel – Winterbottom’s film serves as a critique of the limited options available to women in the Middle East.

 The actor’s career began just over a decade earlier with the British coming-of-age series “Skins”, and took off in a significant way the following year when he starred in the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire”. Around that time, Patel gave an interview to a British paper in which he noted, “Asian actors tend not to be sent Hollywood scripts that are substantial or challenging. I’m likely to be offered the roles of a terrorist, cab driver, and smart geek.” This film is a step above, but hardly the breakthrough Patel deserves.

 As fellow British actor Riz Ahmed recently explained to NPR, non-white actors often face a frustrating three-stage process to overcome typecasting. Early on, they tend to be offered what he called “Stage 1” roles – reductive, race-based bit parts – whereas “The Wedding Guest” provides Patel a rarer “Stage 2” opportunity, what Ahmed describes as “stories that take place on explicitly ethnicized terrain, but aim to subvert those.” The goal, in Ahmed’s eyes, is to reach “Stage 3”, “where I’m not shackled to my ethnicity.” But Patel has a unique kind of problem: He’s an infinitely likable actor of limited range, and as such, he’s bound by more than just his skin color: Regardless of race, he’s a scrawny, youthful, and thoroughly nonthreatening presence onscreen.

“The Wedding Guest”, an IFC Films release, is rated R for “language, some violence and brief nudity”. Running time: 94 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four. (Agencies)

By Mark Kennedy

This news has been read 6997 times!

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