‘Wedding Guest’ stars deliver thrills? They do
A man, played by Dev Patel, is going through security at Heathrow Airport in London. He doesn’t smile, but he seems pleasant enough. He lands in Pakistan, rents a car, then buys two guns.
He gets to his destination, then kidnaps a woman who is to be married that day, accidentally killing a security guard on the way out.
That’s the setup for “The Wedding Guest,” a film which, in grand film noir tradition, nothing is as it seems.
For example, the woman, Samira (Radhika Apte), doesn’t want to be married. She wants to be with her lover, Padesh (Jim Sarbh), who has paid our nameless professional to extricate her.
But as the two head to their rendezvous in New Delhi, even that is not what it seems. Add some hot jewelry, fake passports, loads of money and a few more twists — and then we discover Samira is addicted to thrills.
If this were a 1940s Hollywood noir, maybe it would have starred Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer — or Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. But Patel and Apte do just fine in this British thriller directed by Michael Winterbottom.
Patel, 28, came into most moviegoers’ consciousness as the lead teenager in the Oscarwinning “Slumdog Millionaire,” and he has been working steadily ever since (“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” “The Newsroom”). But “Lion” (2016), about an adoptee who goes looking for his real family in India, proved he could carry a movie, and in “The Wedding Guest” he is smooth and professional, like his character, oozing confidence and, when called for, danger.
Like the best noirs, “The Wedding Guest” is an efficient crime thriller. It’s a B movie with style — the stuff that dreams are made of.
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