Review: 'Marry Me' is 'Notting Hill' to a pop beat, but Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson make a surprisingly charming screen couple

Sure, “Marry Me” is all empty calories as a romantic comedy, but somewhere between Jennifer Lopez’s glamour and Owen Wilson’s aw-shucks sincerity, there’s something earnest and heartwarming about it all.

Lopez plays Kat Valdez, a mega-selling pop star whose life is spent going from concert hall to limo to penthouse, with a small army of assistants capturing her life for commercial endorsements and her social-media following. As the movie starts, Kat is about to score the biggest public-relations coup of her career: Marrying her fiancé, the pop star Bastian (played by the pop star Maluma), live in concert in New York City, ending their vows by debuting their sure-to-be-hit single “Marry Me.”

But just as Kat is about to take the stage for the big moment, she sees what Page Six is reporting: That Bastian was having an affair with one of Kat’s assistants, Tyra (Katrina Cunningham). Distraught, Kat stops the music and declares she’s still going to get married — and picks a random guy in the crowd, who’s holding a “Marry Me” sign.

That random guy is Charlie Gilbert, played by Wilson, a nice-guy math teacher in a New York high school. Charlie wasn’t even supposed to be going to the concert; his coworker, Parker Debbs (Sarah Silverman), was going to go with her girlfriend and another friend, but they broke up just days before the show. So, suddenly, Charlie and his daughter, Lou (Chloe Coleman), are joining Parker at the show — and just as suddenly, Charlie is sucked into a pop-culture nightmare.

The next day, Kat and her manager, Colin (John Bradley, from “Game of Thrones” and “Moonfall”), talk over damage-control options, and Kat decides she’ll keep the marriage going — at least for a little while, until the publicity storm dies down. Colin arranges some interviews, and some carefully stage-managed “date nights,” to feed the appetites of Kat’s fans. But, over time, a spark starts to develop, as Kat sees how grounded and kind Charlie is, and Charlie sees the person behind Kat’s manufactured persona. But the idea of a real relationship is put into question when Bastian tries to insert himself back into the picture.

Director Kat Coiro (whose numerous TV credits include the pilot for “Girls5Eva”) and writers Harper Dill,  John Rogers and Tami Sagher (adapting Bobby Crosby’s graphic novel) mine plenty of jokes out of the absurdities of the entertainment-industrial complex, from Kat’s Vitamix TikTok ads to the nonstop Instagram postings.

Plotwise, there’s nothing fresh about “Marry Me” — in fact, it follows the contours of the Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant romance “Notting Hill” to a surprising degree. But Lopez and Wilson, who are not the most natural choices for a movie power couple, have a gentle, lived-in chemistry that serves the movie well. (Trivia nuts may remember they co-starred 25 years ago in “Anaconda.”) You may not immediately imagine these two as a couple, but you can easily imagine spending two hours with them in a fluffy date-night movie.

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‘Marry Me’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 11, in theaters and streaming on Peacock. Rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive material. Running time: 112 minutes.