‘TIL DEATH DO US PART’ is meant to be an action-thriller about a bride who gets cold feet and runs away from wedding, then her groom’s friends start to hunt her down to kill her.
It’s basically a simple but intriguing premise, but the way the meandering storytelling goes is so muddled and messy.
Since the writers want to keep the audience in the dark, there are times when we keep on wondering what’s happening on screen.
At the start, we see the Bride (Natalie Burn) looking confused on her wedding day.
Then we see her with her groom (Darius Blain) looking like they’re having a honeymoon on the beach.
They talk about the university where they both work together. You’d think it’s a flash forward. Or maybe it’s a dream sequence?
They seem so lovey dovey while they’re dining in a restaurant that they catch the attention of an older couple (Jason Patric and Nicole Arlyn), who amusingly tell them that their love will also fade away, just like theirs.
The movie then returns to the wedding night where the bride runs away and goes by herself to a cabin in the woods. Soon, her groom’s friends show up, intent on killing her.
It turns out that the university they referred to earlier is not really a school but a syndicate of hired assassins.
Both the bride and her groom are hired killers and all the friends of the groom hunting down the bride are also killers.
The trouble about keeping your audience in the dark is that they get confused in not knowing who is attacking who and why, so it’s hard to truly sympathize with the bride once they start attacking her.
But somehow, we still side with her because she’s a woman, all alone and there are so many of them who are ganging up on her.
It turns out she’s one tough cookie who can really subdue men who are much bigger and stronger than her but dumber in their idiocy.
The fight choreography is not really that good but Nathalie Burn sure knows how to defend herself against her dimwitted aggressors.
The guys all look stupid fools and we are really rooting for the bride to finish them all off quickly, even if she’s not nearly as convincing as Uma Thurman as the avenging bride in “Kill Bill”.
Her main antagonist is the Best Man (Cam Gigandet), but he’s not really that menacing.
Actually, he’s more irritating than terrifying as he shamelessly chews the scenery.
And the dudes with him who want to kill the bride have names like T-Bone and Big Sexy but they actually look very foolish and silly, and they all proved to be of no match to the bride whose pristine white wedding gown eventually gets so blood-splattered.
Darius Blain as the groom is meant to be a dangerous co-conspirator and controlling partner, but he too proves lame in his final showdown with his bride.
It’s easy to conclude that if ever their wedding did push through, she would be asking for a divorce sooner than soon.
The movie really needs a good editor to make the narrative more cohesive.
Some parts are meant to provide a clever twist, like the elderly couple that the bride and her groom met in a restaurant, but it just doesn’t work effectively.
The whole movie is so boring at nearly two hours. You can see all the padding.
It takes about half an hour before any action takes place.
And the fact remains that although all the characters in this movie are hired killers, it looks like that none of them is really an expert in killing people.
Its director, Timothy Woodward Jr. seems to specialize in thrillers like “The Call”, “Silencer” and “Gangster Land”, but none of his films have impressed us so far.
In this movie, we just don’t invest in any of the characters, not even the bride, because the script was just haphazardly written.