Grade: C+

Verdict: Flawed fluff but still appealing.

Details: Starring Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey. Rated PG-13 for profanity and sexual situations. One hour, 30 minutes.

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Review: You know the old saying: always a bride maker, never a bride.

That's the fix in which Mary (Jennifer Lopez) finds herself in The Wedding Planner. Addicted to all things bridal since she was a little girl (she staged doll-size nuptials with her Barbie and Ken collection playing the entire wedding party), Mary has turned her childhood hobby into a career.

When we first meet her, Mary is holding together a huge society wedding, barking orders like a general deploying troops. She snaps instructions to the photographers, gives the bride a last-minute pep talk, and coolly handles a report that "the FOB is MIA" (translation: nobody knows where the father of the bride is.)

It's all very high-powered and glamorous. But once the cake is cut and the bride's bouquet tossed, Mary goes home alone and has dinner with Antiques Roadshow.

Then one day while crossing the street, she's rescued from a runaway dumpster by Matthew McConaughey. He's a dreamboat walking -- handsome, heroic and a doctor. The two immediately hit if off but, as ever, the course of true love . . .

Directed by Adam Shankman, The Wedding Planner has an inviting prenuptial glow. Plus, the leads are delightful.

Lopez has a winning self-assurance and a surprising versatility, combined with a subtle vulnerability. She reminds us that there's more to her than the woman in that dress.

For his part, the engaging but often uneven McConaughey benefits from playing a character who's focused and meant to be taken seriously (he wears glasses). Together, whether bickering or bantering -- or executing a killer tango at a dance class run by Fred Willard -- they're almost irresistible.

Which leads us to what's not so irresistible about The Wedding Planner.

We don't get to see enough of Mary as a wedding whiz; the early sections in which she feeds the best man his speech or rescues a bridesmaid's dress are quite funny and while the romance is enjoyable, we keep wishing for some more wedding-day weirdness.

More disastrously, the movie has a major sitcom infection. It's plagued by sitcom dialogue, sitcom plot twists, sitcom characters and, most annoyingly, a bouncy sitcom soundtrack. Even the extras and bit players are strictly sitcom.

On its own flyweight terms, The Wedding Planner is an appealing movie.

What hurts is that inside this appealing movie is an even more appealing movie trying to get out.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service