Lord help us. Beginning what is sure to be a never-ending trend in girl gross-out comedies, Bridesmaids come out swinging (and talking about giving blow jobs, swallowing cum and having explosive diarrhea). What begins as a funny movie in the first half devolves into a rather banal rom-com way off-target for what it should be. The worst part is that considering this is such a long movie, at 125 minutes, 40 minutes could have easily be cut out, making the final product near perfect.
Annie (Kristen Wiig, who also co-wrote the film) is a sad middle-30s woman in Milwaukee (home of great tax breaks for filmmakers, dontcha know!) who is unlucky in love and in life. Her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is having better luck as she's getting married to a very wealthy guy in Chicago who moves in a circle of a very rich set. Lillian asks Annie to be her maid of honor and introduces her to the other bridesmaids. One of them is Helen (Rose Byrne), the rich wife of one of Lillian's husband's work buddies, who immediately gets into a competitive battle with Annie over who is a better friend to Lillian. Of course, Annie is dirt poor, after her baking business collapsed in the recession, and Helen is a fancy housewife with nothing to do but be a fancy hostess. This back and forth sets off a series of silly vignettes where Annie ends up looking like an ass as her average style doesn't cut it with Lillian, Helen or the other bridesmaids.
Somewhere in the second act, this turns into a pity-party for Annie, who alienates everyone and screws up every wedding event by pushing too hard against Helen. There's an aborted trip to Las Vegas (hello, The Hangover 1.5: Girls Gone Wild), a bridesmaid's dress fitting with tainted food that causes everyone to get sick, and a tantrum at the wedding shower. Everything goes downhill for Annie (and for Lillian's wedding). Meanwhile she meets and sparks a relationship with a local cop... from Ireland... uh... (to say nothing about her English roommates... it seems that Milwaukee is some International City of Significance for the English-speaking world).
Aside from the need to have jokes that you would be embarrassed to tell to your mother, the main motivation of the movie is to show scenes that make women in the audience say "oh -that happened to me too" (but, of course, these things have never happened to anyone because they're so over-the-top). It's really just a bunch of pretty girls saying ugly things. That's a lot of fun, but it doesn't have the freshness of Harold & Kumar, Superbad or Observe and Report.
Wiig, not being much of a veteran of the big screen, reverts to her signature Saturday Night Live characters too frequently, sometimes saying things under her breath like that woman on the Weekend Update (whose name I don't know, because I mostly watch it in fast-forward). She does have some good acting moments, though; probably the best moment of the movie, which died in the theater I was in, is when Annie sees Helen falling apart from stress and self-pity and she gives this fantastic smirk overflowing with schadenfruede. (I guess the audience I was with was not looking for subtlety, but just for shit jokes.)
Aside from not being particularly funny, the second half gets a bit preachy, like when Annie is told by one of the (fat) bridesmaids that she should pick herself up and dust herself off and stop feeling bad for herself. I get it, but it's totally not the right tone for this movie. This is a juvenile, silly thing, not a self-help dissertation. Yes, Annie, should stop moping around and hook herself up with the Irish cop, but she should do it through burping and saying "shit" and "fuck", not through baking a goddamn cake!
Girl gross-out movie, to thine own self be true. Motherfucker.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
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