Movie Review: “Bride Hard” Is An Action-Comedy With No Laughs

When a mercenary group takes a lavish wedding hostage, they have no idea what they are in for as the maid of honor is actually a secret agent ready to rain hellfire upon anyone who would ruin her best friend’s wedding.

Where to begin? A movie like director Simon West’s “Bride Hard” doesn’t require much critical reaction. The short and dirty review for this movie is that it’s flat out awful. Calling this movie bottom-of-the-barrel dreck doesn’t even begin to describe how terrible it is. Let’s get into specifics.

“Bride Hard” begins with a montage of imagery of two young, cheerful girls, obviously close friends. Following this sequence, the film jumps ahead 30 years to Paris, France, where Sam (Rebel Wilson) is hosting a bachelorette party for her longtime best friend, Betsy (Anna Camp). As an audience, we know that the pairing of these two actresses could be a recipe for success (hello “Pitch Perfect”), but alas, it isn’t meant to be. Even these two charming actresses can’t save this mess.

As Betsy and her bridesmaids — Sam is joined by Betsy’s college roommates Lydia (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, fresh from her Oscar winning role in “The Holdovers”) and Zoe (Gigi Zumbado) and the groom’s sister, Virginia (Anna Chlumsky) — go out for a night on the town, a group of secret agents attempt to start a surveillance job. It turns out Sam is a secret agent, and she’s somehow managed to reschedule the whole bachelorette party to take place in Paris so she can work while maintaining her commitments as Betsy’s Maid of Honor (stupidity runs rampant in this movie).

Shortly into the night, Sam’s handler or coworker, whose role is never made clear, Nadine (Sherry Cola), finds her and gets her to the job, where Sam promptly does everything she’s been told not to do. Sam’s actions play out with unconvincing, sloppy fight choreography — a constant throughout this movie — and she saves the world. Of course, Betsy and the other bridesmaids notice Sam’s absence, and Betsy removes Sam as her Maid of Honor, giving the role instead to her soon-to-be sister-in-law, Virginia.

Back in the United States on a private island off the Georgia coast, because Virginia’s family is filthy rich, Sam reluctantly attends the wedding. There, a group of mercenaries led by Kurt (Stephen Dorff) take the entire wedding hostage, leaving Sam the lone person capable of saving everyone.

In all honesty, this is a setup that could have led to some fun shenanigans. Instead, we’re left with a soulless husk of a film. There are constant jokes dropped by the all-star cast (and it is surprisingly stacked — Justin Hartley, Sam Huntington, Colleen Camp, and Michael O’Neill round out the cast), but none of them land. An onslaught of ribald humor is thrown at the audience in hopes of shocking some laughs, but it all quickly grows stale.

Ultimately, the script is lousy and predictable (which could have been forgiven if anything about the movie was even remotely amusing), the effects are subpar, and the performances are subpar. “Bride Hard” is a flabbergasting watch that leaves you questioning how it even ended up on the theater screen to begin with.

In the movie’s defense, it did seem to go over relatively well with the preview audience. The guy sitting next to me laughed out loud several times, and the ladies sitting behind me seemed to be into it. I even heard someone exclaim that it was a good movie when it came to an end. So your mileage may vary. However, my advice remains: steer clear of this one.

In Theaters Friday, June 20th