JENIFER Lopez apparently likes to take control and issue orders. Maybe she thought she had found the ideal role in The Wedding Planner but the hot Latino star looks to have gone cold on the idea long before the flagging finale.

La Lopez is Mary Fiore, wedding planner supreme in an America already obsessed with personal trainers and psychiatrists. When high society is getting hitched she ensures everything goes without a hitch; such is the military precision of her perfectly organised showpiece occasions, the bride only arrives at her instruction.

Unflappable and quick thinking, sassy and sexy, J Lo's Mary is good company, humorous too... until the movie has to have a story.

Mary can ensure the path of true love runs smoothly up the aisle for everyone but guess who, herself. To make matters worse, her loving but interfering father has gone behind her back by arranging her marriage to Massimo (Justin Chambers) a hapless, wholly unsuitable if kindly new arrival from back home in Sicily.

Mary, meanwhile, has committed the one sin in her specialist profession. She has fallen for the groom of her latest big-league bash: handsome, charming Dr Steve Edison (Matthew McConaughey and his smiling dimples). To be fair, when they first met, she was unaware he was about to marry Internet tycoon Fran (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Pistol Pete's wife), who had just booked her services.

The Wedding Planner would like to call itself an old-fashioned romantic comedy, a date movie too, in the screwball style of the golden age of Hollywood, but that would be misleading. The comedy flounders in the face of a lumbering plot; romance is killed by a combination of Chambers and Wilson-Sampras playing such unappealing characters and McConaughey and Lopez looking ill at ease with each other.

While their disdain grows for an icing-sweet script devoid of sparkle, sophistication and smart lines, first-time director Adam Shankman can only turn his old choreographic skills to dancing on the grave of one of the Hollywood mismatches of the year.

Today's task: plan to avoid this over-elaborate wedding celebration.