The Wedding Guest (2018) Review

Posted on the 11 February 2020 by Caz @LetsGoToTheMov7

When Jay is heading from Britain to Pakistan for a wedding everything is not as it may first seem and he is not just heading across to be a guest of the wedding. He plans to kidnap the bride-to-be.

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We quickly find out that Jay is a hired gun and he is hired to kidnap a woman just before she is about to get married. When arriving in Pakistan he is seen with many passports and keeps changing his rental car, obviously trying not to be tracked or spotted very easily. When he kidnaps Samira it does not go to plan when a guard sees him doing the dead and tries to stop him, the guard ends up dead and that is when everything starts to go very wrong!

A slight twist in the story is that Samira was actually expecting someone to do this to her. She was being up into an arranged marriage and wanted to be with the man she loves her Indian boyfriend Deepesh. So Jay was hired to get her safely to her lover, but with the guard killing everything had changed and Deepesh changes his mind about actually saving her. Which I guess in hindsight she gets a lucky escape from him considering with one small mishap he no longer wants to risk being with her.

Throughout it attempts to be a very clever plot driven film which it is not at all, it very quickly feels pointless and confuses itself too much. Not really being able to decide what genre it actually wants to be in. A little bit of a shame really as it could have been interesting when it came to the arranged marriage part of the plot, but it doesn't focus too much on that and instead attempts to have more twists and turns to then get away from the whole damsel in distress angle. Trying to make Samira into an interesting scheming character but by that point I really did not care and had lost interest.

The characters are all rather horrible and don't really have a lot of background therefore actually being bothered about them does not happen at all. Dev Patel really has become a good leading man as well, so it was a little bit disappointing with the material he was given to work with from start to finish in this film. I can see why he was wanting to go in this direction as it is very different from the characters he has portrayed before.