Hollywood Product - The Wedding Date

Genre: Romantic comedy

The pitch: To spite her ex-fiance, single New Yorker Kat (Debra Messing) pays suave male escort Nick (Dermot Mulroney) $6,000 to pose as her new boyfriend for her sister's lavish wedding in England. Jealousy, gigolos, bitterness and reckless spending — the perfect ingredients for a Valentine's Day date movie.

Money shots: Prudish Kat, insisting on a sexless arrangement, makes a barricade of pillows when she shares a bed with Nick. The next night, drunken Kat maxes out her cards at an ATM to pay for Nick's sexual services. Horny Kat does a strip tease for Nick in the film's only sexy moment.

Flesh factor: Mulroney flashes a bit of cheek stepping into a shower. Messing covers her hands over her breasts when confronted during her own shower scene. TJ (Sarah Parish), the loud best friend character, displays lots of cleavage and crass behavior.

Product placement: Kat meets Nick on a Virgin Airlines flight. Kat compares the price of Nick's full sexual services to a down payment on a Ford Focus.

Best line: Kat apologizes to Nick in advance for her family. "I love my dad, but since he's my stepdad, he's technically not like family. He's more like a hostage."

Worst line: "The hardest thing is loving someone and then having the courage to let them love you back," one of the endless, pompous aphorisms intoned by Nick, "the Yoda of escorts."

Hit single: While Kat and her sister (Amy Adams) hang out in a limo after a party, the soundtrack plays Air Supply's "All Out of Love" — as if we haven't been punished enough.

Feminist message?: When Kat finally chooses to have sex with Nick, the film treats the scene as an empowering triumph, as if she's taken charge of her sexuality. But would The Wedding Date be so blasé about prostitution if their gender roles were reversed?

Hey, Wait a Minute: Why do so many of The Wedding Date's American characters live in England? Because it's based on Elizabeth Young's English chick-lit novel Asking for Trouble.

The bottom line: Talk about "something borrowed." The Wedding Date is derived primarily from Julia Roberts' body work. It's a nuptial spoof with Dermot Mulroney, like My Best Friend's Wedding, a romantic comedy set in England like Notting Hill, and a glorification of prostitution, like Pretty Woman.