Rating (2.5 out of 5)
A slow moving very predictable drama/comedy.
Rachel (Kristen Bell) is left at the altar and her estranged father Harry (Kelsey Grammer) appears on her door step. After a drunken evening together, they go on Rachel’s honeymoon cruise together, where they struggle to make amends.
You see how the movie will developing as soon as the wedding starts, and from that point you know what will transpire. If you have a movie that is this transparent, then the ride better be really enjoyable. In this case, the ride was very basic but not horrible.
What I Liked: I liked the some of the scenes on the cruise ship. The notion of having a table of people you meet and hang with through the cruise is a nice idea. I have almost always gone with family, so my table has always been family, so having a table full of strangers is a bit of a foreign concept.
What I liked was it wasn’t raunchy, or nasty or anything that you see in a lot of movies. It was a good natured film about two people trying to relate after a number of years apart.
What I Didn’t Like: Everything was just too convenient. Nice people at the table, they are selected for honeymoon contest (and wind). It was just all too perfect. Felt like the getting to know each other wasn’t all the difficult.
The start of the film was also too fabricated. Rachel is a workaholic and is on her phone all the way up to her wedding starting (on a Sunday). There were quite a few problems with this to me: 1) if she was like this, then he should have known before hand. They tried to explain it by them already having this discussion. 2) they probably would still have gotten married, and then divorced the following month in reality. 3) Having her work all the way up to the wedding seemed wildly unrealistic. Even the workaholics I know would have kept going through getting ready, and then put the phone down. They might have picked it up after the ceremony. So doing it right before hand and putting the phone in the bouquet was just too much.
Rachel and Harry go out for drinks, and start drinking really hard. We are never privy to what they discussed. So how they turned from Rachel hating Harry, to drinking all night long, then being so drunk she invites him on the cruise, and then back to hating him again when on the ship. The setup to get on the cruise was just poor writing.
The end was a bit hokey, and seemed easy.
Conclusion: This isn’t a painful movie to watch, but don’t go out of your way watch Like Father right away either. Like Father is a movie to watch once you have finished all the other Netflix films.