'The Wrong Wedding Planner' Review: The predictable Lifetime thriller offers decent TV and guilty pleasure
Hell hath no fury like an ex-fiancee scorned. But to what end? 'The Wrong Wedding Planner' opens with a disturbing scene of a girl being dragged and tied to her bed. We immediately get a sense of the nature of events that are to unfold but the hows and whys form the rest of the story.
A seemingly harmless wedding planner with a sunny disposition willing to go the extra mile to make her clients happy — anyone would want to believe in someone like that and Ashley (Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe) is no different. "I trust you with my life," she tells Mandy Raine (Kristin Booth), without the slightest clue of what was to ensue.
Ashley works out of fiance Brad's (Steven Richard Harris) gorgeous home and juggles between winding up marketing projects and wedding preparations. Brad goes to work and is particular about the accounts that his firm deals with - his promotion and pay hike depends on it. It's now been established that the burden of getting the wedding together is on Ashley and she takes it sportingly, hires Mandy.
Ashley and Mandy get along famously until the day she finds out she had been inviting trouble to her home all this while. Brad comes clean on his past, reveals he and Mandy were engaged at one point but they had to part ways and that was the end of the story. Or so he thought.
Mandy loves Brad dearly and hasn't moved on from him. It is evident. But the steps she takes to stay on her path is inappropriate — making duplicate keys to his and Ashley's home, cyberbullying them with Ashley's private photos, installing a camera in the bedroom, hacking their computer system and many more such drastic steps that make her a very wicked and immoral character.
What follows next is the couple taking every precautionary measure they can take to ensure that Mandy stays out and away from their lives. Enter, Detective Jones (Vivica A. Fox), who is reluctant to involve herself in the investigation of the harassment Ashley and Brad have been tackling simply because there's not much to hold over Mandy. But she tries. No prizes for guessing how the story ends.
'The Wrong Wedding Planner' tries to be a serious thriller film and it does in bits where you don't know what the next steps of the vengeful ex-lover would be but that's about it. It does put up some good performances, but nothing that makes your skin crawl.
Right from the start, director David DeCoteau makes it a point that the audience is not in for a surprise — maybe he did it unintentionally but what's a thriller when you know what's to come. The sinful background score every time Mandy appears on screen with her unforgiving eyes just gives it away and since then, there is hardly anything that we couldn't have guessed. In a nutshell, it offers you decent TV and guilty pleasure.