Til Death Do Us Part review.
A bride fights off the groomsmen when she bolts on her wedding day. That makes it sound more fun than it is.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Til Death Do Us Part
Directed by Timothy Woodward Jr.
Written by Chad Law and Shane Dax Taylor
Starring Natalie Burn, Cam Gigandet, Jason Patric, Orlando Jones, Ser’Darius Blain, Pancho Moler, D.Y. Sao and Neb Chupin
Til Death Do Us Part Review
Our efforts to catch up on what we missed in 2023 hits a brick wall with the surprisingly bad Til Death Do Us Part. All the elements exist for a fun time. The movie manages to fall short on every level. It seems like it would be hard to screw up an action-packed story…but they really make it look effortless. For starters it’s too long. It slows itself down repeatedly for flashbacks. While they are integral to the plot…the method of delivery feels random and disconnected. A stripped down, all action version of this would have been preferable.
A Bride (Natalie Burn) takes off on her wedding day and is hunted down by the wedding party’s groomsmen. It turns out this is more than a simple retrieval mission. The Bride fights off her attackers and a night of bloodshed and death ensues.
A straightforward approach would benefit a plot like that. Til Death Do Us Part opts for the opposite. It constantly stops the action to show us the Bride and her Groom (Ser’Darius Blain) on their honeymoon. You didn’t read that wrong. The flashbacks are to the couple on their honeymoon. The story is the Bride running away from the wedding. We figure out quickly why that is…obviously tied to the Bride’s incredible aptitude for killing. The movie seems to go out of its way to make it a headache early, however. They think the confusion adds to the story. It doesn’t.
In fact, the flashbacks are the biggest issue in Til Death Do Us Part. They aren’t presented with any rhyme or reason. They begin randomly and end abruptly. Worst of all, they aren’t commenting on anything happening in the current timeline…at least not purposefully. It’s like they filmed a short story and felt the need to chop it up with no regard for story beats…and toss segments into the main storyline with the same disregard. You’ll rarely see the device used worse.
The movie seems to pride itself on vague mentions to a larger world of espionage and assassins. It gives you what you need to know by the end…but it’s passing mentions of the University and its rules wants desperately to be John Wick. The original John Wick left a lot of mystery in the world he was attempting to escape. It was fascinating and helped fuel demand for further installments. Nothing hidden away in Til Death Do Us Part makes you want to know more about the world. The further the story strays from the Bride murdering groomsmen…the less interesting (and entertaining) it becomes.
Til Death Do Us Part goes a step further by leaving all its characters unnamed. Outside of a couple nicknames bantered about between the groomsman…they’re all listed as numbers in the credits. The lack of names is almost fitting given the lack of character development. Which…had this been kept to a simple Bride murders a wedding party story…would be fine. That’s a decent, if light, 85-minute movie. Til Death Do Us Part runs for 109. 109 minutes with nameless characters who have no arc. It borders on madness. It crosses into tediousness.
The cast does the best they can with the literal nothing they are given. The only interesting aspect of the movie is the fight scenes…and even those underwhelm. In part because the movie continuously cuts away from them for its random flashback segments. In part because we have no reason to care about these people. It also features an inordinate amount of time knocking on doors. Most of the first act is spent watching unnamed men in tuxedos knocking on doors. If you can make it through that…it gets better. But not much.
Nothing happens for over a half hour. Just when something is finally going to happen…the movie cuts to a flashback. Eventually the fight scenes begin…and then it will cut to a flashback. Those flashbacks involve the Bride and Groom meeting an older married couple in Puerto Rico. What they learn on the trip will play into what is happening in the story. You’ll have lost interest long before then.
Even the climax of Til Death Do Us Part is drawn out too long. Worse, if you managed to pay attention to the lazy reveals that precede it, it doesn’t leave to an effective ending anyway. There are a few moments where Til Death Do Us Part seems to think it’s a comedy. It isn’t one…but points for effort, I suppose. The good news is there is some decent blood, and a chainsaw comes into play at one point. You can never hate a chainsaw.
What you can hate, however, is a movie that gets lost in a poor edit and a script that seems to revel in its annoyances. Why this wasn’t just 85 minutes of a Bride killing her attackers…I will never know. Everything that the movie “adds” to it subtracts from the film’s effectiveness. And it adds a lot.
Scare Value
Til Death Do Us Part misses far more than it hits. Jarringly edited, confusingly vague and not worth the wait for the explanation. Some fun fight scenes and a group of actors pulling something out of almost nothing save it from disaster…but aren’t enough to recommend a watch. Tedious and largely unfunny…there might be an edit of this that works. This isn’t it.
1.5/5
Til Death Do Us Part Links
Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu and Amazon
