Bride Wars

I only sat down to watch this because I mistakenly thought it was called McBride Wars and quite fancied the idea of Chi and Danny McBride duking it out to see who is the better tubby comic supporting player! Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway play the titular brides, lifelong best friends: Liv and Emma, who as impressionable young saplings were guests at an ideal June wedding in the Plaza Hotel and have held onto that dream for themselves ever since. When they receive proposals within days of each other it looks like the dream is on for a wedding in the first and last week of that month, but a mistake in the booking places both ceremonies in different suites at the same location on the same day. With both women refusing to have a dual ceremony and refusing to give up their dream wedding, the stage is set for relationship meltdown and an hilarious war of the bitches – at least that’s the plan. Bride Wars is more like Bland Wars, a rather witless script and plotline that covers just about every comic observation about weddings that has ever been committed to celluloid. Perhaps the film should’ve been titled Clichéd Wars? (Yes I’ve got a theme going here).

Characterisation is particularly one-sided, Liv is the aggressive high-powered one, Emma the sensitive soul who has compulsive need to please all those around her. When the gloves come off, Emma’s inner-extrovert springs to life, years of pent up wallflowering to Liv comes out and strikes with a vengeance. That’s the sole character arc in the film; the writing is so routine that everyone else, including Liv, is exactly the same person at the end as they are at the beginning. There’s also a distinct lack of creativity in the denouement; a conflict in one of the relationships crops up completely out of the blue in the final act to allow a solution in the finale – perhaps the film should have been called Convenient Wars? Performances from the two leads are pretty solid, although both actresses have more talent than this film allows for. Hudson’s been coasting in these safe, formulaic comedies for years now but Hathaway has actually attempted to challenge herself as an actress. I can only hope that Bride Wars is not her first step in the journey back towards The Princess Diaries. I know I’m entirely the wrong sex to be discussing the merits of Bride Wars, and I know that your average female viewer isn’t nearly as particular as men when it comes to comedies, but I still can’t see anyone being all that impressed by this. As a late minute casual rental or home box office purchase it might fit the bill, re-watch value is zero.

The Disc: An undemanding film has been given a rather lavish audio-visual presentation from Fox, with a transfer that seems very faithful to the original theatrical presentation, and a DTS-HD audio track that has enough life in it to handle the film’s more outrageous moments. There’s not a tremendous amount of extra features for such a recent release, nor is the content inspired in any way. The most worthwhile feature is probably the Something Old, Something New setting that enables pop ups of wedding trivia during playback of the film.