Film Review | Bridesmaids

See what I’m doing here? Come on, try harder. Last week, I condescended to review a romcom, and a boring one at that. Now, I’ve decided to plunge into a largely all-girl comedy romp, hinging on that perennial guy-phobia zone: marriage.

What colossal heap of steaming celluloid (or is that digital?) dung could possibly be leading me into such murky back alleys of cinema? If you guessed Transformers: The Dark of the Moon, you would be right.

But it’s not just that I would rather avoid another Michael Bay explosionsfest… it’s just that the robot-vehicle-toy trilogy has inspired some of the most vitriolic, and inspiring, works of film criticism in the past couple of years... and truth be told, I feel a bit apprehensive about joining in the fray– it’s too much of a competition at this point. Run a Google search and you’ll see what I mean.

The consensus is that Bay’s film is an insult to the art of cinema in general and so, critics and commentators are doing their best to out-hate the latest Transformers instalment. It’s a heady game of one-upmanship but I have to say that BBC’s Mark Kermode takes the cake.

I suggest you catch his diatribe – it’s available online on BBC’s podcast site – purely because it is an embarrassingly (for me) succinct piece of film criticism, building up a series of arguments through striking imagery… but the crucial point Kermode makes is that for him, Transformers is not even a film. It’s an ‘industrial point’, meant to prop up the ailing 3D industry, rake in the cash and not much else.

And romcoms have often been bandied about as industrial points too. As have gross-out buddy comedies (just look at the success of The Hangover series).

The Kristen Wiig-starring Bridesmaids (she also co-wrote it along with Annie Mumolo) kind of blends the two… so you’d expect it to be an extra-cynical affair. But the truth is that, instead of being a calculated percentage of either, it really is a mix of both, held together by a healthy dose of crazy.

Wiig plays Annie, an emotionally unstuck former bakery owner living in Milwaukee and ploughing through (often literally) a loveless relationship with the sleazy, self-absorbed Ted (Jon Hamm). When her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) decides to get married, she appoints Annie as maid of honour.

While Annie relishes the opportunity, she becomes less enthusiastic after she meets the wealthy and beautiful Helen (Rose Byrne), one of Lillian’s bridesmaids. A war of one-upmanship ensues between the two… and the other bridesmaids aren’t exactly well-adjusted types either.

Paul Feig’s film is co-produced by Judd Apatow, one of the forces behind the Seth Rogen school of comedy (Knocked Up, Superbad), and the shameless indulgence in gross-out comedy works a treat here because it effectively helps make the film a female version of The Hangover.

Why is this a good thing? Well firstly, it helps the film be an anti-Sex in the City: the villain could easily have been one of the characters from the famed HBO franchise and it’s the values of self-confidence and true friendship that ultimately win out in the end.

Some formula is played out a bit too straight – Irish actor Chris O’Dowd plays a traffic cop who worms into Annie’s hardened heart – and some of the gags – albeit funny – feel shoehorned in, as if the overall film were a patchwork of comedy sketches rather than a coherent story. But hey, if that doesn’t suit you, there’s always giant car-bots making ‘industrial points’.