'Big Wedding' no big deal

"THE BIG WEDDING" takes just about everything that's wrong with the modern romantic comedy and jams it into one movie.

It's about a wedding, so it's utterly unoriginal. It's pointlessly obscene, elitist, phony, glib and, given all of that, inexplicably crammed with esteemed actors.

Including Robert De Niro, who recently appeared in "Silver Linings Playbook," a movie that repatriated the romcom for real people and avoided every problem that plagues "The Big Wedding."

De Niro is Don, the patriarch of a privileged clan that includes an ex (Diane Keaton), a live-in girlfriend (Susan Sarandon), a disaffected daughter (Katherine Heigl), a wiseacre son (Topher Grace) and an adopted Colombian son (Ben Barnes) now grown and on the verge of marrying his childhood sweetheart (Amanda Seyfried). Robin Williams, a recovering alcoholic priest, presides.

The whole group gathers for a wacky weekend full of contrived situations - to avoid offending the groom's deeply religious mother, for instance, Don and his resentful ex-wife must pretend to be married.

It gets worse: Grace plays a 29-year-old physician who's still honoring a vow of celibacy, which makes zero sense given his family's priapism. Actually it makes zero sense, period. And he's not the most ridiculous character in "Big Wedding." That would be the movie's stock snob, a judgmental character we (reluctantly) take at face value until we learn she's in an open marriage and takes on all comers.

There's not much good about "Big Wedding," except that it clocks in 90 minutes. I don't think the editors could stand to look at it for long.

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