Bridesmaids (2011)
Directed by: Paul Feig
Nice-but-unsuccessful (in love and work) Annie (Kristen Wiig) is asked by best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) to be her maid of honor. Along with Lillian’s moneyed fiancé comes a new candidate for the role of best friend, über-wealthy Helen (Rose Byrne), and the scene is set for some major jockeying for position. Throw in some other quirky girl-friends, and you’ve got the ingredients for – well, a total mess, really.
The premise of this movie is a proposition to its audience, and that proposition is “You know what it’s like when….” Each time the proposition is made, it is made to us via the medium of one or other of the main characters, and it is about the awfulness of other people in general.
To make that proposition work, you have to be able to identify with the characters, and that’s hard to do when you’ve only just met them. So the first few instances of the proposition are only marginally funny. Trouble is, it doesn’t get any better.
No one is more than sketched in as a character, and that includes Annie and Lillian. The remaining girlfriends are two-dimensional – in fact, two of them, Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey) and Becca (Ellie Kemper) look like photocopies of characters from Sex In The City. Others are just caricatures. Annie’s mom is an idiot. The British, in the form of Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson (Australian but playing a Brit) are present as comic freaks, which at least makes a change from casting them as villains.
If the only way you can create empathy for your main character is to downgrade everyone else, then the movie is in trouble – and Bridesmaids certainly is. Everything is telegraphed so far in advance, and so loudly, that the audience feel like unpaid script-writers. Annie and Helen hate each other, so you KNOW they’ll be firm friends by the end, after some catastrophic-but-contrived situation.
Gross-out joke follows gross-out joke, which would be ok if they were well-done – but they’re not. The high points for me were the various product placement spots which, by comparison to the rest of the movie, were done with subtlety.
The plot is the slenderest thread – a single, weak strand on which to hang a series of contrived misadventures and hollow emotions. So bad it’s – just bad.
