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Some movies send audiences talking into the night. “License to Wed” does
something almost like that. It inspires sputtering, muttering incredulity.
Think of everything that went into it. People wrote it and weren’t embarrassed.
Other people put money into it, and without shame. Some hearty soul said, “Yes,
I’ll direct this.” And then actors were found, actors with careers, actors who
could have said no.

They said yes. And at no point in the whole process, from the moment the
screenwriter wrote “Fade In” to the assembling of the final cut, no one in
power said, “Hey, I can’t do this. This is garbage. My name is on this. Even
after death, this stink bomb will follow me into all eternity. Pull the plug.”
The plug wasn’t pulled, and so we have this, a 90-minute bad joke, in bad
taste, done badly.

Oddly enough, there was an untapped subject here for comedy — the
marriage prep courses that churches make couples take — but there was no
honest attempt made to find the real humor in that. Instead, “License to Wed”
gives us Mandy Moore and John Krasinski as a young couple who want to get
married by the neighborhood pastor, the Rev. Frank (Williams). He insists
they take marriage prep, and because the nuptials are in three weeks, he puts
them on a crash course.

Then the fun begins. Frank bugs their bedroom to make sure they’re not
having sex. He manipulates them into arguments, tries to undermine the
fledgling relationship the prospective groom has built with his fiancee’s
family and badgers the fiancee into revealing intimate details of their love
life. He sets out to destroy their relationship and end their engagement and,
along the way, he almost gets them into a fatal car wreck.

None of this is funny. Williams isn’t funny. His Rev. 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. They’re incompatible. 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.

– Advisory: This film contains sexual situations.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.