There’s an old expression that goes, “If you can’t think of anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I propose we update that a little. “If you can’t think of anything nice to say, you’re probably talking about ‘Bride Hard.’”
Let’s be perfectly frank, since I don’t know any other frank way to be: A lot of comedies aren’t very funny, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re terrible. A movie can be light and good-natured and get you through your afternoon even if it doesn’t have a single thigh-slapper. I don’t even think I’m a tough audience for comedies. If you make a bright and competent movie without a lot of laughs I am usually willing to hand wave the whole experience away as a harmless trifle.
But “Bride Hard” harms. It’s abrasively hard to watch. It’s not just that the jokes fall flat, it’s that the film looks like a pile of celluloid got chopped up randomly and reassembled in what the editor could only assume was the correct order, because the script mysteriously vanished. Events happen without motivation, seemingly at random intervals. Characters suddenly have information they never actually learned. Action sequences which should, in theory, deftly hide the fact that Rebel Wilson isn’t an acrobatic martial arts expert are instead so unconvincing they might as well cut to behind the scenes footage of the actor in her dressing room playing Wordle while her stunt person adjusts her wig.
The premise is fine. “Die Hard at a Wedding.” That’s a bulletproof elevator pitch. I know because it was totally functional when “Shotgun Wedding” did the exact same thing three years ago with Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel. That’s a movie that a lot of people probably thought was bad at the time, but if they knew “Bride Hard” was coming I suspect they might have been kinder. “Bride Hard” makes “Shotgun Wedding” look like “The Philadelphia Story.”
Rebel Wilson plays Sam, a secret agent whose best friend since childhood, played by Anna Camp, is about to get married. Sam can’t tell her bestie or any of her bridesmaids — played by Anna Chlumsky, Gigi Zumbado and Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph (yes, really) — what she does for a living. So when she ghosts them at the bachelorette party to kick ass and retrieve a stolen weapon of mass destruction, they decide she’s a bad friend and demote her from the Maid of Honor to a measly bridesmaid.
The wedding takes place at — oh, for #@%’s sake — a Georgia plantation. (The film goes out of its way to say there are secret Underground Railroad tunnels, but the plantation is on a tiny island and the tunnels don’t run underwater, so they couldn’t have been terribly useful, now could they?) Anyway, everything goes badly until Stephen Dorff shows up with a small army of mercenaries and takes everyone hostage, which somehow only makes the wedding slightly worse. Now it’s up to Sam to save the day, kill some bad guys and prove she’s not a terrible friend after all.
Again, that’s a decent concept, with a decent cast. Rebel Wilson as a badass secret agent is a smart move, since it usually seems like she’s about to kick someone’s butt anyhow. Anna Camp radiates light, so no matter how crappy the family she’s marrying into seems, we want the best for her. I’m not sure how they got Da’Vine Joy Randolph in such a nothing role, since all she does is stand around and talk about how hot she is (not that I’m arguing the point), but maybe she appreciated the compliment. Or the paycheck. Or both. Oh yeah, and CBS’s “Tracker” is here, too. Justin Hartley throws himself into the wacky part, but it’d be so much cooler if this was all just an episode of “Tracker,” let me tell ya.
The rest of the movie writes itself, or at least it should have. Instead, it’s like they set a perfectly good screenplay on fire and filmed whatever they could make out before it disintegrated. Embarrassingly bad plans, tedious attempts to pad the runtime by inventing the world’s silliest security system, and pointless, meandering dialogue abound.
Even the simple plot collapses quickly. You’d think, since the opening action sequence involves Sam retrieving a WMD, that the rest of the movie would be about bad guys trying to get it back, or at least getting revenge. Instead, Dorff’s generic villain just coincidentally wants inside the family vault, which also means there was no need to take the whole wedding hostage. They could have just struck the night before — or days earlier, or weeks later — and saved themselves a lot of bother. All the plot for “Bride Hard” had to do was have a reason to happen, and even that got bungled.
“Bride Hard” comes from director Simon West, a filmmaker best known for action movies like “Con Air,” “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and “The Expendables 2.” So it’s not a shock that he doesn’t have a brilliant sense of comedic timing, but you’d imagine he’d at least be able to whip up a coherent action sequence. Sadly, that’s not usually the case in “Bride Hard.” A few of the simpler fights are functional, but every time something allegedly cool happens it’s undermined by lousy visual effects and/or spatial confusion.
There are two actors in “Bride Hard” who deserve MVP status, and I have no idea who they are. They’re just two mercenaries wearing balaclavas and I don’t think they even have any lines. But there’s a moment when Anna Camp passes along a badass message from Rebel Wilson — “Oy am vengeance!” — and the camera cuts to these guys and they look cartoonishly terrified, like they’re literally about to wet themselves, which is adorably silly. Whoever those actors are, they understood the assignment and they delivered. Kudos, my friends. Kudos.
“Bride Hard” ends, like many comedies made after “Smokey and the Bandit II,” with a gag reel that plays during the closing credits. The gag reel isn’t any funnier than the movie that preceded it, but it serves a different function. It assures us SOMEBODY had a good time. It just wasn’t the audience. Good for them, I guess. Bad for us. Very, very, very bad for us.
“Bride Hard” hits theaters on June 20.
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