The new movie “The Drama” stars Zendaya as Emma and Robert Pattinson as Charlie — a happily engaged couple who learn the hard way that the most important chore before the wedding is, maybe, do your due diligence.
Amid the bustle of preparations, they’re getting quietly drunk with another couple when one of them proposes a confession game: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
The stories from the group are about cowardice or adolescent cruelty. Then Emma has to speak up. She reveals that when she was a chubby, angry schoolgirl in her early teens, she planned to carry out a mass shooting on her classmates, though she didn’t follow through on the idea, for reasons that aren’t quite clear.
Her friends are aghast, wondering if she’s a latent psycho who needs to be reported to the police. Charlie is shaken. He keeps insisting that he’s okay, although it’s pretty obvious that he’s not, throughout several sequences where he acts like a skittish lamebrain, much like the typical buffoon in a TV sitcom.
Amid the tension, both bride and groom behave badly. Charlie commits a Me Too transgression that would get him deservedly arrested. And yet nobody asks out loud if the nuptials should be called off, or at least postponed. Inertia carries them to the wedding day, which is a predictable disaster.
The director and writer of the film, Kristoffer Borgli, apparently can’t decide if he’s doing an odd take about gun violence, or if that topic is just a clumsy framework for the usual rom-com antics.
It doesn’t help that there’s no particular chemistry between the leads. Zendaya is likable, even after the skeleton in her closet is dragged out. Robert Pattinson does the best he can, but comes across as a grungy version of Hugh Grant.
Movie mash-ups don’t always work. Yes, it can be tasty to put chocolate on your peanut butter. But this is more like gas-station sushi sprinkled with M and M’s.
As a result, “The Drama” rates two stars on a scale of five.
