Frank is a prurient, creepy, sadistic, unspiritual, grandstanding, tiresome horror show, a bad guy all around and about one adjustment away from being a perfectly acceptable and rather interesting villain in a drama. But somehow the audience is under obligation not to notice this. We're supposed to accept that Frank has the best interests of the young couple at heart.
Williams suffers, but Moore gets it worse. She plays a young woman who adores Frank without question, even to the point of siding with him over her fiance. Essentially, Moore has to play someone who has the veneer of intelligence, but whose judgment is so faulty that she can only be described as an idiot.
That's not a flattering role, and Moore, perhaps out of discomfort, keeps falling back on the same facial tic: She scrunches up her face, bares her teeth and smiles in a tight, nervous, ingratiating way. Moore was either miserable or had a bad case of the cutes. Krasinski, as the prospective groom, fares better, in that at least he sees what we see, that Frank is a monster, but the movie is not really on his side.
This is a comedy, and the intention is that we should think that Frank had a plan all along. The funny thing, or rather the unfunny thing, is that after 90 minutes of this ordeal, the audience comes away convinced that this couple absolutely should not marry, and that the family should just skip the wedding altogether and just wait to be invited to the divorce. "License to Wed" achieves the worst of both worlds, in that we end up certain that Frank maliciously tried to break up these people -- and that they had no business being together anyway.
They don't get along. How's that for a feel-bad romantic comedy? By the way, the pastor's church is St.
Augustine's, which is mispronounced throughout the movie to sound like the Florida city and not the saint. It's a minor thing, but it says something. E-mail Mick LaSalle at This article appeared on page of the San Francisco Chronicle Frank is a prurient, creepy, sadistic, unspiritual, grandstanding, tiresome horror show, a bad guy all around and about one adjustment away from being a perfectly acceptable and rather interesting villain in a drama.
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