THE WEDDING PLANNER

Tom Meek

Matrimonial miscues make for a reliable romantic-comedy formula. It worked for My Best Friend's Wedding, and it works here, despite some maudlin eddies and a cast that seems ill suited to jell. Jennifer Lopez plays a control-freak wedding planner who orchestrates her clients' "big day" with the precision of a commando raid. She's out to land the next big account and become a partner in her firm, but for all her success, she's always the planner and never the bride. Her dad (Alex Rocco) tries to arrange a marriage with an English-butchering Italian transplant (Justin Chambers, who nearly steals the picture), but it's a chance encounter with a pediatrician stud (Matthew McConaughey) that sets her heart on fire. Naturally the good doctor is engaged to "the next big account" (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras), and thus 90 minutes of raucous, unrequited love follows.

McConaughey and Lopez lack pizzazz -- what holds the film together is the comic pacing of director Adam Shankman and a battery of fringe characters, namely Joanna Gleason and Charles Kimbrough as the nouveau riche parents of the bride-to-be and Judy Greer as Lopez's ditzy assistant. The Wedding Planner doesn't take the cake, but it's a snappy confection.