Movie Review: Wedding Planner Mystery

Stars: 4 out of 5

Pros: Good characters and a great mystery

Cons: Usual Hallmark cheese

The Bottom Line:

Death at a wedding

Planner caught in the crossfire

Good movie version

Every Eventuality is Planned for – Except the Murder

I’m sure it will be no surprise to you that I have piles of books around the condo that I’ve never found time to read.  They sound good, and I fully intend to read them, but other books come along and bump them down my TBR list.  One of those is the book Veiled Threats, the first in a series about a wedding planner by Deborah Donnelly.  No, I still haven’t read the book, but I have seen the movie that Hallmark made based on it called Wedding Planner Mystery, and I really enjoyed it.

Carnegie Kincaid (Erica Durance) is a wedding planner who has just hit the mother lode for her business, the back to back weddings of two cousins in the Parry family.  They are rich and fairly famous in Seattle – or is that infamous?  Doug Parry (Billy Mitchel), father of the second bride Nicky (Chelan Simmons), is under investigation for tax fraud, and that has added a complication to both weddings.

But Nicky’s wedding is second and she is a bridesmaid in the wedding of her cousin Diane (Chelsey Reist).  However, that wedding ends in tragedy when their third cousin, Michelle (Barbara Kottmeier), takes off from the wedding early in Nicky’s car, crashes a block away, and dies.  Suddenly, the police are nosing around and Carnegie feels the heat of the investigation.  Can she solve the crime and save her business’s reputation?

This plot was quite complicated, and the way it twisted around kept me off guard.  However, it all made perfect sense in the end.  Well, one or two details got overlooked, although we can make educated guesses about them.  Still, the story was fun, and how everything unfolded was very easy to follow.

And I was surprised at how much I came to care for the characters.  When a book is turned into a movie, often the characters are the first casualty.  While I’m sure they are all richer in the novel, there were several that stood out to me enough that I truly cared about how they would fare by the time the story ended.  Heck, even when Carnegie was alienating people over the course of her investigation, I understood her motives and truly felt sorry for her.

And the acting was decent.  I especially enjoyed seeing Erica Durance starring in this since I’ve been watching her as Lois Lane is Smallville.  Even more fun, she has a constant nemesis in Aaron Gold (Andrew W. Walker), a reporter that would give Lois a run for her money.

Of course, this does have a liberal dose of the usual Hallmark cheese, and Carnegie’s narration didn’t help with that.  But if you know that going in, you’ll enjoy it.

So far, this is the only movie I can find in the franchise, but I hope Hallmark changes that since Wedding Planner Mystery was so much fun.  And I definitely need to make the time to get the book read now, too.  (If I can find it, of course.)