When Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) gets engaged to Colin (Kevin McKidd, right), she asks her best friend Tom (Patrick Dempsey) to be in her wedding in Made of Honor.

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A playboy waits 10 years before deciding to ask his best friend to marry him, only to discover she has just become engaged to someone else in the bubbly, if overly familiar Made of Honor.

There aren’t many surprise moments in this bright, agreeable film which closely follows the cookie-cutter rules of most wedding movies right down to the “who will get the bride?” moment at the end. If the premise sounds familiar that’s because the script is more or less a flip on the 1997 Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend’s Wedding in which she decided, after a decade of friendship, that she was really in love with her longtime friend and set out to wreck his wedding plans. The guy’s plans aren’t quite as mercenary as what Roberts’ character did in that film. And although you can pretty much gauge just where Made of Honor is headed, it’s a pleasant ride played engagingly by Patrick Dempsey (of Grey’s Anatomy and Enchanted) and Michelle Monaghan (Gone Baby Gone, The Heartbreak Kid).

The oddly titled Made of Honor refers to the fact that Hannah (Monaghan) has asked Tom (Dempsey) to be her “maid of honor” at her wedding in Scotland. Although she and Tom have been friends since their awkward late-night dorm room meeting in college a decade earlier, he had always just relied on Hannah to fill his Sundays as a companion … and not in a sexual way. Tom is a serial dater whose hard and fast rule for other women is that he never sees them two nights in a row. When something doesn’t pan out, he could always count on Hannah to be there as a last-minute date.

But when Hannah goes to Scotland for six weeks on business, Tom suddenly realizes how much he misses her and that now he wants her to be a permanent part of his life.

But Hannah returns from Scotland with a dashingly handsome fiancé, Colin (Kevin McKidd). Not only is Colin heir to a Scottish distillery fortune, he lives in a castle and is a nobleman to boot. He seems to be the perfect catch, which makes Tom’s attempts to take Hannah away from him all the more difficult.

Cutely, Tom tries to bring himself closer into Hannah’s life by doing all the things maids of honor are supposed to do, including advising the prospective bride on selecting her china and her trousseau and organizing her bridal shower. The shower ends disastrously when Tom takes advice from one of the bridesmaids who hates Tom and believes she should have been chosen maid of honor.

Dempsey, the shaggy rogue who develops a heart, is engaging as Tom, although there isn’t quite as much chemistry between him and Monaghan as one may have hoped. Director Sydney Pollack has fun with the small role of Tom’s much-married father who is always on the lookout for a new bride.

This is a romantic fable, complete with castle and a handsome “prince.” It will play into the hearts of all true romantics out there.

***Made of Honor

Starring: Patrick Dempsey, Michelle Monaghan, Kevin McKidd, Sydney Pollack, Kathleen Quinlan.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com