It's been a rough couple of days at the movie for your loyal Punch Drunk Critic. It started off with a thoroughly irritating screening of The Unborn on Thursday, followed up by a painful(but mercifully brief) experience on Saturday. On that day I had the displeasure of sitting through Bride Wars: a shallow, vapid, film full of shallow, vapid characters with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Anne Hathaway and the always-trying-my-patience Kate Hudson play Emma and Liv. The two have been best friends since childhood, and apparently they are friends only because they both share a love of weddings. They've been planning their own weddings(not to each other, although that would be interesting) for years and will accept nothing less than the very best. So when the two find themselves engaged at pretty much the same time(because that's how life works), they both decide to do it up in style the way they always dreamed of, and that means June weddings at the Plaza Motel. Unfortunately, a mistake causes both weddings to be scheduled on the same day and supposedly one must drop out to make room for the other. This causes a war between the two brides-to-be to see who can outdo the other or something.
What follows is 87 minutes of pure unadulterated torture, as Liv and Emma sabotage one another's weddings mercilessly. The two women are polar opposites. Liv, a cold and ferocious lawyer, pulls no punches with the people she's in competition with, exposing the meeker Emma as a closet tramp with a wild side she doesn't want her nice but boring boyfriend to know about. Emma does her part as well, torturing the formerly fluffy Liv into dealing with her own insecurities about her appearance. It's stuff that's not easily reconciled, but ofcourse in a film like this logic is thrown totally out the window in favor of an easy, simple, happy ending. And apparently "happy" for this film means having one character throw away love because her husband isn't as cool as she'd like him to be, so she tosses him aside for a sleeker version with about five minutes of screentime. Awesome moral values, there!
I'm sure there are women out there who think I'm missing the point. That this is really a film about friendship and sisterhood and blah blah blah, and I'm sure that might've been what they were shooting for. But it's not what they gave us. Movies like this make women look far worse than our guy flicks do. The main characters here are just as dopey and brainless as any conquest from any 80's sex film. It I could, I'd make both these twits take the walk of shame.
But, if you are a brave soul or perhaps a person prone to self brutalization and feel you absolutely must see this movie, you won't be TOTALLY left out in the cold. There is a scene, a great scene really, where Anne Hathaway dances like a stripper for a solid 2-3 minutes. It's wonderful, and sad at the same time, that the rest of the movie couldn't have just been this looped together for 90 minutes. As it stands, this is Hathaways's Norbit flick. The drop dead awful film that follows a glorious Oscar worthy performance.
Kate Hudson dances too. Nothing to see there, folks. Move along.
3/10
