Wednesday, 31 October 2012
FILM REVIEW: BACHELORETTE
Hopscotch Films
Now Showing
Odious though they may be, comparisons are also inevitable specially when it come to films. So it will be for Bachelorette, which will be compared to Bridesmaids (and suffer as a result), coming so soon down the aisle as it does after that 2011 box office smash.
Never mind that director Leslye Headland has adapted her own off-Broadway play which was in existence before Kristen Wiig caught bridal fever and lost her mind as a result.
Here the bridesmaids duties (and requisite descent into madness) fall to not one but three women: Regan (Kirsten Dunst), Gena (Lizzy Caplan), and Katie (Isla Fisher), high school friends who are reunited for the wedding of Becky (Rebel Wilson), the fourth member of their high school clique, the so-called B-Girls.
It's Regan, the Maid of Honour, who takes the impending nuptials the hardest. Blessed with good looks, a doctor boyfriend (whom we never see), and her own career working with "cancer kids", Regan can't believe that Becky (known at school as Pigface) is getting married before she is.
But Regan is also a control freak which means she works hard to suppress her rage in order to pull-off the best wedding possible for her friend. That is until she reunites with Gena, who flies in from Los Angeles and immediately into the path of high school love, Clyde (Adam Scott), and Katie, a ditzy retail assistant who's easily led astray by coke fiend Gena, and her controlled facade is soon ripped open.
As is Becky's wedding dress during some drunken post-bachelorette party foolery, setting the three ladies off into the New York night in the hopes of repairing the dress; an all-night odyssey which will involve a strip bar, a suicide attempt and a lot of opening of olds wounds and resentments in between, with only 12-odd hours to fix the dress, and their relationships, before the orchestra strikes up 'Here Comes The Bride'.
Not as uproariously funny as Bridesmaids, or its male cousin The Hangover (though there is a group of bucks, headed by a deliciously despicable James Marsden playing against type), Bachelorette does have its moments, courtesy of the comedic skills of Isla Fisher, and the breakout performance of Lizzy Caplan (who you may or may not remember as the Goth chick friend of Lindsay Lohan in 2004's Mean Girls).
Caplan's Gena, nursing a broken heart since high school and attempting ever since to dull the pain with booze, drugs and one night stands, gives Bachelorette a much darker tinge than either of those other aforementioned comedies. And refreshingly for a bridal-themed comedy, it doesn't end happily so much as all's well that ends well - for now.
And even if Bachelorette doesn't make for a great night out, it will make for a good night in (on DVD) with your girlfriends.
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