I may have never seen The Wedding Pact or, let's face it, any Hillary Duff movies before, as she was born in the time when teen entertainment was too young for me. But what you may not know is that I have a hidden love for romcoms and when the sequel to a movie I never saw before crossed my way, I totally watched it.
Back in 2014 -- or a few months in the timeline of this movie -- Elizabeth (Duff) and Mitch finally got married after a wedding pact that started back in college. This movie decides to take that cute story and inject utter despair, as Elizabeth is pregnant and her husband is now dead. She's moved away to live with her sister and is trying to get her life started again when her mother-in-law Donna (Leslie Easterbrook from Police Academy!) serves her with papers, asking for custody of a baby that hasn't even been born yet.
Luckily, Kevin Pyle (Connor Trinneer) is a lawyer who overhears her problems at a coffee shop -- this movie has more coffee being ordered than a Starbucks on the first day of pumpkin spice latte season -- and realizes that his sister Robin (Gail O'Grady, Criminal Minds) is the one behind the lawsuit. He always tries to help people, so he decides that he'll handle Elizabeth's case for $2 an hour.
Richard Riehle shows up and man, that dude is always great. I kind of liked the turn by Elizabeth's ex Jake (Scott Michael Campbell) too. The movie moves pretty quickly and hey, any film that has a judge that has a puppet dog and no one complains, well, I kind of like strange quirks that just randomly appear.
This film was directed and written by Matt Berman, who also made the first movie, as well as Big Wind On Campus (Kevin P. Fairley, who plays the judge in this, was in that movie), Hollywood and Wine (which was co-directed and written by Fairley), Model Citizen (which also had Fairley, Campbell and Bob Bancroft, who show up in this), Killer Defense and Manipulated (which has a dream cast: Traci Lords, Michael Paré, Greg Evigan, John de Lancie and Judy Landers).
I'll get back to the weird stuff the site is known for soon enough. But if you also like romantic films and a good cry, well, here it is.
