Viewed in
2012
Formats
DVD
Premise
Kristen Wiig stars as a woe-is-me lady who's life goes to hell when her best friend gets married.
Liked
Comedic performances.
Disliked
Crawling pace.
Thoughts
Even after waiting months for the overhype to die, it still could not escape underwhelming my expectations.
The best part of the movie were the performances. Wiig acted the heck out of her role and Melissa McCarthy's presence was definitely properly-hyped. But I also give props to Wendi McLendon-Covey as the bitterly disillusioned mother and Chris D'Owd as the absolutely charming state trooper/love interest. The jokes basically worked, from the scatalogical to the broad to the irreverent. My favorite scenes were Wiig breaking traffic laws to get the attention of D'Owd, and pretty much every line uttered by McLendon-Covey.
While I liked Wiig's performance, I found her character increasingly annoying with her blatantly woe-is-me attitude. Like many Apatow-stable movies, it felt 20-30 minutes too long: too many minor characters (Wiig's roommates were totally unnecessary), the temptation to cram every joke variation in each scene (instead of selecting the best), and the inability to know how to exit a scene.
Another annoying thing about Bridemaids was the misleading title. It was hardly an ensemble piece at all. Had it been called "Woe-is-me Annie" I would've liked it 15% better.
As for people calling it "Hangover with chicks", I do not get that one bit. Not only was it not ensemble, the premise was completely different. And the humor was much different. The Hangover was an unabashed onslaught of raunchy outrageousness. Here, it tried to balance broad comedy with some raunch, while still succumbing to some pitfalls of chick-flick-ville.
I know plenty of gals who are just as foul, unrestrained, and sexually unabashed as any normal American, so if the shock value of this movie is "Look! Girls can be dirty too!", my response is "duh". The Hangover succeeded because it took raunch to a new level, not because it was about a subset of people. A better comparison for Bridemaids might be Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, "Look! Asian can be dirty too!".
Bottom line, you can never have enough un-dumb, interesting female-driven movies, but we can do better than this as a watershed moment in cinematic history.
