15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Yippee ki‐yay, Rebel Wilson is a one-woman killing machine in ‘Bride Hard'
In a directing career going back almost 30 years, Simon West has never even tried to make a good movie. His filmography is a catalog of intentional mediocrity — 'Con Air,' ' The General's Daughter,' ' Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,' ' The Mechanic.'
Yet it takes a certain discipline to stick to what you're sort of good at and never make an audience suffer through your deepest feelings about life and existence. Like his latest effort, 'Bride Hard,' West's movies are never exactly good, but they're almost never boring — and boring is the only unforgivable sin.
His latest movie's title, 'Bride Hard,' says it all. It has become a cliche of the Hollywood pitch meeting for would-be filmmakers to describe their proposed projects in terms of two previous box office hits: 'It's like 'Dracula' meets 'The Avengers'!' 'Bride Hard' doesn't try to hide the fact that it's a mashup of ' Bridesmaids ' and ' Die Hard.' So, even though it's a cynical effort, with no aspiration behind it, there's something playful about it too. Everybody's in on the fact that they're doing something silly.
Like 'Bridesmaids,' 'Bride Hard' focuses mainly on the maid of honor, Sam (Rebel Wilson), who finds herself in a competition for the approval of her best friend (Anna Camp), who is getting married. Sam keeps falling down on her maid-of-honor duties, and one of the bridesmaids, the wealthy Virginia (Anna Chlumsky), keeps showing her up.
But what Sam's friends don't know is that Sam isn't being negligent. She's trying to balance the imperatives of a social life with a career as a world-class secret agent, a one-woman killing machine.
The first 20 minutes, which almost amount to a 'Bridesmaids' parody, are a little slow. The bridal party is in Paris, and Sam keeps having to ditch her friends every few minutes to do spy work. But the movie picks up when it moves to an estate in Georgia, where the wedding is to take place. At that point, the 'Die Hard' aspect of the story kicks in.
In place of the late Alan Rickman, who played the villain Hans Gruber in the 1988 action flick, we get Stephen Dorff and a team of mercenaries bursting into a wedding ceremony with machine guns. They take everyone hostage, except for — guess who? — Sam, who just happens to be apart from the wedding party at that particular moment.
So you have a situation in which a really bad guy is looking for money and probably intends to kill all the hostages. And you have one talented but unarmed person, Sam, who has to figure out how to rescue them.
Sometimes even a humble, not-so-good movie can teach us lessons about filmmaking, and this is the lesson of 'Bride Hard.' You know that whole 'Die Hard' formula, in which it's one person, facing long odds, trying to rescue everybody? That formula is indestructible.
In the case of 'Bride Hard,' we barely believe in the characters or their relationships. Wilson — the hilarious Fat Amy of the 'Pitch Perfect' franchise — isn't convincing as an action star, and the movie's light tone all but guarantees that nothing truly bad will happen. And yet, when Sam goes on the attack, we're right there with her. Somehow, we end up caring.
Wilson is fun, as always, and she's nicely supported by Chlumsky as the passive-aggressive Virginia, and Camp who, as the bride, walks a nice line between sincerity and comic absurdity.
