Metacritic reviews

The movie-calendar equivalent of last July's "Six Days, Seven Nights," this star-powered romance overcomes a shaky start to outpace that passable confection by several runaway laps.

But the movie's vital signs improve remarkably in the second half, and especially in the last act. The proceedings suddenly pick up some screwball charm, the writing improves (with several truly inspired one-liners tossed in here and there) and the secondary characters begin to click.

A shiny bauble full of dead weight, gloppy good feeling and airless cliches. And every time you try to grab onto "Bride's" characters, they run away. [30 July 1999]

A clumsy motion picture that strives so hard for the perfect romantic ending that it triggers a gag reflex along the way.

It doesn't generate enough laughs to make up for the fact that you never figure out what he (a misogynistic USA Today columnist played by Richard Gere) sees in her (a dizzy small-town hairdresser played by Roberts). Or, for that matter, what she could ever see in him.

Runaway Bride's Josann McGibbon & Sara Parriott script is so muddled and contrived, raising issues only to ignore them or throw them away, you wonder why so many people embraced it.

In "Pretty Woman" Roberts played a tough whore with a soft heart. Here, she's a business owner whose sense of self is so tenuous she doesn't even know how she likes her eggs done.

Comes off as nothing more than a PG-rated excuse to showcase Roberts in a variety of wedding gowns (five, by my count) and an exhausting number of comedy cliches.

A runaway bore.

Maybe writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott were thinking of Tracy and Hepburn--assuming they were thinking of anything--but not even Roberts's smile can put this one over.