'Wedding Date' Aims at 'Bridget Jones' Fans

Debra Messing (search) is single, desperate and hoping her hired male escort will impress the family — and her ex — as she travels to London for her stepsister's wedding in "The Wedding Date." (search)

A little "Pretty Woman," a little "Bridget Jones," "The Wedding Date" follows Messing's character, Kat, as she takes $6,000 out of her 401(k) to hire a male escort Nick (Dermot Mulroney (search)) and ultimately, fall in love.

"Sweet, romantic, romantic comedy. It's a love story," Mulroney told FOX News. "[Getting married is] a very universal time and place, it's a big life change, same as birth and death."

"It's a love story. Feel-good, Valentine's Day," Messing chimed in.

Messing conceded that not all weddings are romantic.

"I was at a wedding that was bad, only because we were put at the schmo table," she told FOX News. "This is what my family calls the schmo table. And it was a particularly bad-positioned schmo table. The schmo table is everyone else at the end of the list when you don't know where to put them, and you just throw them all into one table and none of them know each other."

But critics seem to regard "The Wedding Date" as a schmo movie. The Associated Press' Christy Lemire says the flick has every "rom-com" cliche in the book, from the neurotic single New York woman to the daffy British friends who smoke and drink.

"Director Clare Kilner, who also directed the Mandy Moore teen-angst drama 'How to Deal,' may have wanted to give single girls (and married women who like chick flicks) the cinematic equivalent of a cup of chamomile tea or a favorite sweater — warm, comfortable, familiar. What she's come up with is tepid, awkward and flat," she wrote, giving it one star out of four.

"The Wedding Date" feels "endless," even at only 88 minutes, adds the New York Post.

But an inside Hollywood source told FOX News entertainment reporter Bill McCuddy that "Any film with the word 'wedding' in it can't lose."

Certainly seems to be true.

FOX News' Mike Waco, Bill McCuddy and William LaJeunesse contributed to this report.