You can’t say the title doesn’t warn you. Quoting the darkest part of the traditional wedding vow and revolving around both matrimony and mortality, this quite silly, rather weird action movie starts with an unnamed bride (Natalie Burn) and groom (Ser’Darius Blain) preparing to walk down the aisle. But before the Wedding March can start, the film cuts to a different point in time where the couple in question are frolicking on the Puerto Rican beach where the film is set and shot. They go to a bar where they meet another, older couple (Jason Patric and Nicole Arlyn) and then another crash cut jumps us to yet another point in the story when the bride is running away from her husband, but is pursued by all seven of the groomsmen from the wedding – including the menacing, misogynist best man (Cam Gigandet) who keeps insisting on reciting his big speech, even as he prepares to kill the bride herself.
Turns out – and stop reading here if you don’t like spoilers – that the bride, groom, and everyone in the wedding party, even the randoms met in the bar, belong or have belonged to another one of those insidious assassination networks like the one in the John Wick franchise and other movies. This one is called the University, which is mildly droll given how dim-witted many of the groomsmen assassins turn out to be. Our girl, still in her skintight lace wedding dress, which gets progressively more blood-stained as the film goes on, battles each one in turn as they stalk her around a fancy villa where she’s hiding out. One starts to wonder who the film-makers think their ideal viewer is supposed to be – perhaps survivors of abuse who dream of wielding broken bottles and chainsaws on men who’ve wronged them?
Burn hasn’t got a lot of range as an actor but she’s graceful in combat, adept at roundhouse kicks and doing the splits, the latter a move whose utility in combat is questionable but looks awesome on screen. It’s just a shame the script gives her and the rest of the cast such terrible dialogue, and drags the whole thing out with all those silly flashes forward and back.
• Til Death Do Us Part is on UK digital platforms from 8 April.
