The Big Wedding

A divorced couple (Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro) has to pretend to still be married because their adopted son (Ben Barnes) has invited his birth mother (Patricia Rae) to his wedding, and she doesn't know about the divorce. With a cast like this (including Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfried, Susan Sarandon, Topher Grace, Robin Williams, Christine Ebersole, David Rasche), someone like Robert Altman might have done something—in fact, he did, in A Wedding (1978)—but writer-director Justin Zackham (adapting an obscure Franco-Swiss picture) doesn't seem to know it's 2013, and his moss-covered plot hasn't worked since Eisenhower was president. Zackham fritters away a great cast on a dreary, predictable, unfunny comedy. It's by-the-book moviemaking when the book is so out-of-date it should have “Gutenberg” stamped on the spine.