THE WEDDING Date sometimes feels like an unfunny Will and Grace episode without Will as it tries to cash in on the show's success.

The lovely Debra Messing plays a successful New York single girl Kat hires paid escort Nick (Dermot Mulroney) as her boyfriend for her sister Amy's (Amy Adams) wedding in Britain.

She discovers to her horror that the groom's (Jack Davenport) best man is Kat's ex-fianc, Jeffrey (Jeremy Sheffield). To regain face and ensure she is not humiliated on the big day she hires Nick because she is, shock horror, single.

Are audiences so brainless that being single should be so readily accepted as some sort of terrible stigma?

But when the handsome Nick turns his hand to solving family problems, she soon finds herself falling in love with him.

Messing acquits herself well and she has an aura and comic talent but she is swimming against a deluge of poor dialogue and predicable plotting.

Opting for a mix of romantic drama and light comedy it ends up failing to deliver in both departments.

Some people will no doubt enjoy its frivolous charms but the majority will already be filing for divorce. Shallow and callow. Iwan Davies