On their wedding day happy couple Peter (Alec Baldwin) and Rita (Meg Ryan) are visited by an old man (Sydney Walker) whom neither of them knows.  The old man asks Rita for a kiss, a kiss which enables him to swap places with Rita – though both are at first unaware of what has happened.  Peter becomes increasingly worried about his new wife’s erratic behaviour and slowly he begins to determine that something is amiss – but is it to late to save not only his marriage but also his wife’s life? 

Where Prelude to a Kiss works is in the relationship between Peter and Rita.  Ryan and Baldwin work well together with a great onscreen chemistry, however it is wasted for more than half the movie when Ryan is forced to play an old man trapped in a woman’s body.  Up until this point it is fun to watch the couple get to know each other and a more traditional romantic comedy plot would have served both actors better. 

The heart of Prelude to a Kiss’s problem is that the body swap doesn’t make any sort of sense and whilst the climax explains this important plot point away it feels hollow and tacked on.  Were we given more setup the swap may have had more of an impact, but as it stands it is nothing more than a random occurrence – Walker’s old man just happens to get up and find his way to Peter and Rita’s wedding – simply because that is what the plot calls for, not as a result of events growing from the story. 

Underdeveloped story aside, in the end Prelude to a Kiss suffers from the fact that it doesn’t know what it wants to be, a serious drama or a light romantic comedy and it ends up being neither.  The story – an old man in a young woman’s body - could have been mined for a lot of comic potential like 2003’s Freaky Friday remake starring Jamie Lee Curtis rather than the serious drama, and waste of a fine cast, we are given instead.