Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Groomsmen: First Look’ on Hallmark+, The First Film In A Trilogy About Three Best Guy Friends Finding Love

The new Groomsmen film trilogy stars Jonathan Bennett, B.J. Britt and Tyler Hynes as best friends who each find love over the course of three movies which roll out weekly this month on the Hallmark Channel. The franchise kicks off today with The Groomsmen: First Look , in which Britt’s character, a type-A doctor named Pete, falls for the perfect woman who happens to live halfway around the world. With the help of his friends, he takes a chance on love and lives happily ever after.

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Opening Shot: A bride runs down a city street and finds shelter in a bar. Despite being told that the bar is closed, she begs to hide out for a moment, at least until the men chasing her are gone. “They’re the reason I’m not getting married today,” the frantic bride tells the barkeep. “Why, who are they?” the barkeep asks.

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“They’re the groomsmen .”

The Gist: After we see this unnamed runaway bride, she begins to tell a story to the barkeep, one that began one year ago at a different wedding. That one was attended by Danny ( Jonathan Bennett ), Jackson ( Tyler Hynes) and Pete ( B.J. Britt ), best friends since childhood. When Pete, a pediatrician based in Philadelphia, meets and falls for Chelsea (Heather Hemmens) at Danny’s sister Hannah’s wedding, he feels helpless. Helpless because Chelsea lives in Bulgaria, where she has a medical practice, and a long-distance relationship with this smart, perfect woman seems impossible. [Insert joke about doctors with borders.]

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Danny, a celebrity agent, Jackson, a baseball player, and Jackson’s 13-year-old daughter Betty convince Pete to chase after Chelsea, so he finds her at her hotel the next morning and professes his feelings for her. They exchange numbers and begin a long-distance relationship.

Over the course of several months, they make time for calls and video chats despite their hectic schedules, and Chelsea comes to Philly to surprise Pete for a weekend, and tells him she wants more. The trouble is that “more” would require one of them to make a pretty big work sacrifice and move halfway around the world. Eventually, they say “I love you,” but it only complicates things because as much as they want to be together, the sacrifices involved terrify them both.

It seems that at every turn, Pete and Chelsea’s relationship is filled with hijinks and minor drama – when Chelsea’s internet goes out on the night of their first video date, he assumes she’s ghosting him. When he shows in in Bulgaria unannounced, to propose no less, he’s almost arrested when he loses the ring on the baggage carousel and chases it into a restricted area at the airport. But each of these situations proves to be a non-issue, resolved almost immediately. And of course when Pete does finally see Chelsea in Bulgaria, he proposes and she says yes. But then comes the “chaotic in-laws” portion of the film where Pete realizes he may never be accepted by Chelsea’s prim and proper parents who look down their nose at… literally everything he does. And when Pete’s hippie-dippy, feng-shui-obsessed mom Georgia arrives for the wedding, the culture clash couldn’t be more obvious.

It takes a while and several speed bumps along the way, but ultimately you know where this is going: Pete and Chelsea get married, thanks in no small part to the support his has from his buds Danny and Jackson.

Our Take: It’s rare to see a Hallmark movie from a man’s perspective (and offering such a warm representation of male friendship, including one that’s gay), and the Groomsmen trilogy delivers that threefold with new films, told from the perspective of each of the three men, releasing each week through the end of this month. There are some aspects of this film, from it’s impressive locations and the narrative framing, that add a cinematic quality and make it seem grander than a typical TV movie. But there are a few issues with it, too, the most frustrating being the tonal shift toward the end that shifts the film from an underdog love story to a Meet The Parents farce.

While the film’s other dramatic moments all feel like minor blips that are meant to illustrate the difficulties of a long-distance romance, once the pair decides to get married and involve Chelsea’s parents in the planning it feels like they, and Chelsea herself, force the film into a brief identity crisis. Rather than rooting for Pete and Chelsea’s relationship in spite of their different backgrounds, the cracks in the relationship make it seem almost like we should want them to split up. But by the end, the tone fortunately shifts back and, while this is a story about the wedding between Pete and Chelsea, the more obvious aspect of the film is the bromance between Pete, Danny and Jackson, whose three-way friendship is obviously the most stable, long-term relationship any of these men will ever have. For whatever faults the movie has,I’m glad it exists. A movie featuring men talking about their feelings with each other and rooting for one another feels like a small miracle.

Parting Shot: The movie begins with a mystery bride running away from her own wedding and telling Pete and Chelsea’s story. Who is she? What does she have to do with anything? Well, when the barkeep asks her that very question in the final scene of the film, she responds, “Pete and Chelsea getting married isn’t the end of the story… It’s only the beginning. There was another wedding,” a hint at what we’ll see in the second film of the trilogy, The Groomsmen: Second Chances .

Performance Worth Watching: Tyler Hynes is billed as one of the three groomsmen, but it feels like he has less to do in this film than the other two. That being said, as Jackson he makes the most of his screen time with his dry sense of humor and his winning role as a devoted single dad raising a cool daughter, and we want more.

Memorable Dialogue: When Pete asks Chelsea if she wants him to bring her to the airport, she tells him, “You have patients waiting for you!” to which the pediatrician replies, “They’re young, they’ll keep.” This line has nothing to do with anything but it made me laugh.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Hallmark has created its own little cinematic universe (the Groom -iverse?) with these three films, and while First Look isn’t flawless, it’s got charming romantic leads, and a great dynamic between Britt, Bennett and Hynes that gives us something to look forward to over the next two weeks.

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