bachelorette

Movies like Bachelorette, The Hangover and Bridesmaids make me feel like getting married is a complete lapse of judgement that will end with you in some kind of physical or emotional pain on what is touted as the best day of your life. I also am beginning to think that I have a very rare thing in my life: friends who are not assholes. Is it really that hard not to be an asshole? Bachelorette says: apparently it is very hard. 

Becky (Rebel Wilson) tells her dear friend Regan (Kirsten Dunst) that she is engaged to her high school sweetheart, Dale (Hayes MacArthur). Despite this piece of apparent good news, Regan calls their mutual friends Katie (Isla Fisher) and Gena (Lizzy Kaplan, who also starred in a previous mean girl movie called Mean Girls) to immediately anguish over the fact her boyfriend hasn’t proposed to her (because in Hollywood, relationships aren’t real unless you’re married), and why does Becky deserve a decent husband anyway? 

Then the movie fast forwards to the day before the wedding. Regan, as maid of honour, has declared herself in charge of the wedding and is cruel to the help. Katie assists by bringing a vast amount of cocaine. Gena is pouting because her ex Clyde (Adam Scott) will be there and she has Unfinished Angst about him. Together, the girls ruin Becky’s bachelorette party with an obnoxious stripper, get told by Becky to grow up, and proceed to Become Mature People by laughing about how they can fit two people in Becky’s wedding dress, which they then tear. Can they fix it in time to not ruin Becky’s wedding? Will they encounter handsome men? Will they all die at the end in a fiery explosion? WE CAN ONLY HOPE SO. 

Bachelorette fails because the cast is so vehemently unlikeable. Regan does nothing but shout, and when she whines about not getting proposed to, you assume it’s because she’s a monster. Katie is painted as the ditz and really is so ridiculously stupid, which she exacerbates by being almost constantly high, that she is entirely unrelatable. Gena is the one I think the audience is supposed to bond with, and harbours a fairly grim secret with Clyde which adds some romantic tension in a sea of pricks (see: Dale’s friend Trevor, played with jerky abandon by James Franco) and needs to move on with her life and perhaps not be so horrible. But lord, you just don’t care about what happens to them. You wish for them to succeed because Becky seems like a nice person who suffered through high school and who clearly isn’t great at picking acquaintances, but otherwise, just...sigh. Many of the characters (Regan, Katie to an extent, most of the men) don’t get enough backstory to connect with the viewer, and some of the lessons—like, bulimia saves lives!—will make you shake your head. 

There are some great lines, Adam Scott is totally a babe who does one of the best wedding speeches you’ll ever hear, it passes the Bechdel Test easily and I’m super pleased Rebel Wilson is getting famous. Also, she kills with the line: “People think I’m too fat for Dale.” Regan’s response is good, but Becky is right. Her friends are horrible. That is the only lesson to take away from this. 

I give it three out of six bridesmaids. And even those three bridesmaids are wearing dresses that they will never wear again.