You know when you check into a hotel and the default TV channel is the hotel promotion channel? Serene music plays as people eat delicious hotel food, workout without sweating in the glam hotel gym and get the best sleep of their lives in a luxurious hotel bed? The new Netflix movie Mother of the Bride is kind of like that, except with Brooke Shields, Benjamin Bratt, iCarly and the guy from One Tree Hill.
Yes there’s an overall plot which I will get to. I promise. But the 90 minutes of Mother of the Bride primarily play as one long product placement for Anantara Resorts, specifically their Layan-Phuket Resort and Mai Khao Phuket Villas in Thailand. The resorts are all name-checked in the film’s opening minutes, so at least the movie isn’t even attempting to be sneaky about it. And the properties look positively gorgeous on screen. I, too, would have immediately accepted an acting gig that would take me to such a beautiful and lavish locale.
But now the plot! Mother of the Bride is Netflix’s latest attempt at getting a piece of the lucrative Hallmark Channel movie pie. Shields, who also serves as one of the movie’s executive producers, is a delight as the title character Lana, a successful pioneer in genetic research, who is shocked to discover that her daughter Emma (Miranda Cosgrove) is returning from an internship in London engaged to RJ (Sean Teale). Emma is not going to get a job or go to grad school. Instead she is going to keep up with the lifestyle Instagram account she started when she was a college freshman. Now Discovery Resorts (the parent company of Anantara Resorts, naturally) is offering her a six-figure sponsorship to promote their brand on her Instagram account.
Despite Lana’s misgivings that being a social media influencer is an actual career choice, she wants to appear open-minded and goes along with this sudden development, heading off to Thailand. “I’m a very non-judgmental person,” she tells her daughter about RJ. “I’m sure I would like this man with initials instead of a name.”
All is well until RJ’s dad Will (Benjamin Bratt) arrives. See, it turns out that Lana and Will had a grand romance in college until Will unceremoniously broke Lana’s heart. “You better open your eyes because you are literally about to marry the son of Satan,” she tells Emma. If all of this sounds a lot like George Clooney and Julia Roberts’ 2022 movie Ticket to Paradise, you’re not wrong. In that movie, which also involved a young woman getting married quickly to someone her parents didn’t know in a beautiful and lavish locale, the parents despised each other and united to try to break up the couple. Here Lana just wants to make sure her daughter is happy and making the right choice, while Will just wants to lean into his sexy, laid back charm. (Bratt has a brand and I definitely don’t hate it.)