It’s not especially fair to criticize the movie that could have been made, rather than the one that was actually made. At the same time, an airplane meet-cute between Alice and Dennis has enough genuinely tart banter, from Bob’s Burgers writers Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin, that the other plots and subplots look even worse. Paul spends most of the movie upset over the possibility of having a threesome Donna, allegedly a lead character, spends most of the movie feeling secure and unbothered. Whenever The People We Hate at the Wedding cuts to Paul and his transparently awful boyfriend Dominic (Karan Soni), it becomes harder to believe that animosity toward his well-meaning sister registers as a major problem in his life. Now Eloise has invited everyone to her London wedding, inspiring immediate grumbling phone calls between an aggrieved Paul and Alice. Their half-sibling visited the American side of the family regularly throughout childhood, but eventually drifted apart from her poorer siblings. Eloise stayed in England and grew up rich, while Donna remarried and had Alice and Paul. The audience is quickly informed that Donna met her first husband Henrique (Isaach De Bankolé) in England, had Eloise, then moved back to the U.S. It’s likely that the real reason behind Wedding positioning itself as a well-balanced triptych is its source material: It’s based on a novel that probably gives equal time to the shared family history of Alice, Paul, Eloise and Donna-covered here with some awkward opening narration and a single flashback scene.

How? Why? Was the long-ago one-two punch of When in Rome and You Again really so noxious? (The answer is yes, but no one remembers them.)

In the opening credits, Bell isn’t even billed above the title, making it clear that Janney and Platt’s characters belong on equal if not greater footing. Yet the movie insists that it is equally about Alice’s brother Paul (Ben Platt) and their mother Donna (Allison Janney), and much (though, at the same time, not all that much) attendant familial and relationship drama. Bell can be a winning anti-heroine, and her director is Claire Scanlon, of the widely loved Netflix rom-com Set It Up. Why is The People We Hate at the Wedding in such denial about being a Kristen Bell romantic comedy? The premise makes perfect rom-com sense: Alice (Bell), coming off a year of personal turmoil and stuck in a hot-and-cold relationship with her boss (Jorma Taccone), reluctantly attends the wedding of her wealthy half-sister Eloise (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), where she meets Dennis (Dustin Milligan), a stranger who falls in love with her whole messy deal.

Book the people we hate at the wedding