Have I seen this movie before? Seriously, I must have seen this, or something very similar to this, before. Oh yes, it was called My Best Friend's Wedding. I had hoped to enjoy this film based on the likability of the leads and to an extent it works. However, the story did not seem to be terribly well thought out. It's as if the writers had the great "idea" of having a guy playing the role of maid of honor and rushed through the circumstances surrounding it rather than trying to develop an actual story with characters we could care about.

As I left the theater I did have something of a smile on my face, but the further away I got, the more that smile faded. It was replaced with questions: Did I really like that movie? What did I like about it? The answers did not come easy.

Let's set the stage. Tom (Patrick Dempsey) is best friends with Hannah (Michelle Monaghan). This lets Tom live the high life, always having a woman to be at his side for companionship while being able to sleep with any woman he wants. Sounds like a perfect situation, right? Perfectly unbelievable. Well, one day Hannah tells Tom that she is going to Scotland for business and will be away for six weeks. This seemingly innocuous occurrence sends Tom into a life-changing crisis. After witnessing his father's (Sydney Pollack) sixth marriage, he finds himself longing for a lasting love, discovering it in his best friend.

Problems step up a notch when Hannah returns home from Scotland with Colin (Kevin McKidd) in tow. This obviously throws a wrench in Tom's plan to profess his love, especially when she reveals they are engaged and are set to be married in rather short order. Complications get even worse when Hannah asks Tom to be her maid of honor. What do you say to that? Yes, of course. As they say in one of the trailers: "It's easier to stop the wedding from the inside." Or something along those lines.

The rest of the film follows Tom as he attempts to fulfill his unusual role while simultaneously looking for a way to break up the happy couple and inject himself back into Hannah's life, albeit in a different role. Will he be successful? If you don't know how this is going to end, you've not seen all that many romantic comedies, a genre that has a hard time infusing anything new into the tried and true formula.

Made of Honor is easy enough to like — generally likable personalities in a familiar story, it is all light-hearted and does not require that you think all that much, plus it is great counter-programming to Iron Man. Problems arise when you stop and think about the characters, where they've been and where they're going; this is when things begin to wither on the vine.