by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $8.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, Anna Chlumsky, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Gigi Zumbado
Intro:
... the fact that this isn’t going direct-to-streaming is confounding in the extreme.
Pitch Perfect 3. Among that film’s many missteps, one of the biggest was its decision to suddenly forget everything to do with acapella, and just became an action film with Rebel Wilson as the de facto lead… for about 5-10 minutes. It was a moment so out-of-place, that it had us wondering whether it should’ve just been that movie for its entirety.
Close to eight years later, we seem to have gotten an answer, with Rebel Wilson reuniting with PP’s Anna Camp for an action comedy. But despite what the film itself may think, it’s not the 2010s anymore.
From its pun title to its ‘Die Hard but…’ plot, this feels like a film that would’ve been mocked-up for another film, like an in-universe example of a character trying to make it in Hollywood by taking schlock roles. The script doesn’t go much further beyond the expected beats of what remains one of the most ripped-off action films in the genre’s history, and while that same framework allows for decent creativity in the homemade weaponry used in the action sequences, second unit director Noon Orsatti ends up letting the better moments get lost in the blurry, clearly-doubled presentation. It even tries to recapture some of that Pitch Perfect energy by having a fight scene set to ‘It’s Raining Men’, which comes across as slapped-together as pretty much everything else here.
There’s also a lot of straining for laughs. Pretty much every character, from Wilson as the loose cannon secret agent that gets results, to Anna Chlumsky as the resident Maid of Horror, to Justin Hartley as the useless best man, is comprised of a single joke repeated ad nauseum, and they aren’t particularly gratifying at first blush either. Everyone looks a bit miserable just being here (another unfortunate commonality with Pitch Perfect 3) and not only is their chemistry with each other quite lacking, any actual laughs they generate feel both accidental and most likely ad-libbed as a means to distract from the film’s actual content. We do not miss when every mainstream American comedy was like this.
From the title onwards, Bride Hard is so by-the-numbers that it feels like being let out of a Groundhog Day-esque time loop of a never-ending wedding rehearsal, only for the actual wedding to play out exactly the same as all those previous cycles. Everything from the action to the comedy to the attempts at character drama feel like relics of bygone standards for this flavour of superfluous star vehicle, and the fact that this isn’t going direct-to-streaming is confounding in the extreme.
