Bridesmaid

Wedding comedies are usually crowd pleasers from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” to “Wedding Crashers” to “Mamma Mia!”. No doubt with “The Hangover: Part II” coming out this summer, Universal Pictures is competing with their own raunch fest called ” Bridesmaids”, but where the R-rated sex-filled wedding films are mostly designed with male leads, this time the women get a shot.

“Bridesmaids” stars Kristen Wiig (How to Train Your Dragon, Despicable Me) as Annie and Maya Rudolph (Idiocracy, Away We Go) as Lillian, two best friends who are nearly 40 and still single…until the later has been proposed to. Lillian is ecstatic and has asked Annie to be her maid of honor, though Annie is having some problems of her own. She’s a failed baker/business owner, painfully single except for a jerkoff FWB (a scummy Jon Hamm), creepy roommates, and a POS car. Basically, her life sucks. To make matters worse, Lillian’s other bridesmaids are complete wackos including 1. A super-rich upstaging woman who only knows how to throw parties 2. A sheltered newlywed 3. An oversexed babymaker 4. And an overweight nut-job. From one big disaster to another, the wedding will prove to test Annie beyond anything she ever imagined.

This retelling of the Biblical Job story relates into modern marriage mishaps, and my God there are a lot of them! Written by Wiig herself and produced by Judd Apatow (The 40-year Old Virgin, Knocked Up), the jokes and sight gags are very creative. Just after the girls go to a Brazilian restaurant for exotic food, they immediately go to a top-shelf wedding dress boutique. As they try on $1,000 dresses, they all get food poisoning and relive a scene reminiscent of “Blazing Saddles”. Later an attempted bachelorette party in Las Vegas is interrupted when Annie gets drunk and acts totally inappropriate. At her part-time job at a jewelry shop, she calls a teenager a “c***”. A tennis match results in some very sore breasts. The rest of the mostly unknown women are good, but Melissa McCarthy shines going between absolutely insane and (surprisingly) the smartest one of the bunch. The cute and pure romance Annie can work out is played by Chris O’Dowd as an Irish cop in Wisconsin!

For as much fun this presents, the storyline is very predictable. Annie will realize that she needs to have some self-respect, and Lillian will learn to appreciate her closest friend. While some jokes are shiners, others are drawn out past our patience. An engagement party turns very awkward with drunken speeches. All kids on screen tell their mothers to f*** themselves. The infamous “dress scene” will titillate some viewers, while repulsing others. Also watching Wiig look like a hot mess throughout the whole movie is just sad.

Nevertheless, while “Bridesmaids” is not perfect or for everyone, there is enough humor and good feeling to enjoy it. The unlikely experiment of a raunchy wedding movie for women totally works. This is an instant classic and a solid date movie.