‘Bride Hard’ Movie Review: Say ‘No’ To Unfunny Rebel Wilson Vehicle
Photo from IMDB
From Jeremy Kibler
All Bride Hard needed to do was be a light, energetic, halfway-amusing Bridesmaids riff on Die Hard. That was clearly the pitch, and it’s a viable setup, made even more promising with a Pitch Perfect reunion between Rebel Wilson and Anna Camp who lead a stacked cast. Then Con Air/Lara Croft: Tomb Raider director Simon West gets the gig. In execution, Bride Hard can’t even get the bare-minimum right, ranging from aggressively mediocre to kind of terrible. This isn’t Melissa McCarthy’s Spy. Hell, this isn’t even Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel’s Shotgun Wedding. It’s a lame, unworthy waste of everyone’s talents.
Rebel Wilson plays Sam, an unreliable maid of honor to childhood friend Betsy (Anna Camp) and a secret agent the rest of the time (she subtly pretends to be a cat-show entrepreneur). It’s at Betsy’s bachelorette party in Paris where Sam sneaks off to finish a mission and ends up getting demoted, Betsy handing the MOH duties over to rich, high-strung future sister-in-law Virginia (Anna Chlumsky). Sam still shows up to the wedding in Savannah, Georgia, on the groom’s family’s whiskey-distillery estate, but she’s excluded from all of the wedding party festivities. That is until ruthless mercenary Kurt (Stephen Dorff) and all of his heavily armed goons arrive on the private island, crashing the wedding and holding everyone hostage to steal gold from the family vault. Only Sam can save the day and prove she’s the best friend ever.
As a competently made movie should, Bride Hard never actually works on any level. Despite a game cast, it’s a pretty consistently unfunny wedding romp. When Da’Vine Joy Randolph (as very confident bridesmaid Lydia) serenades her pregnant gal pal’s unborn baby with an edited version of Khia’s “My Neck, My Back,” it’s a comedic highlight, and it just feels good to laugh. Just for a little bit. No bigger laughs ever arrive, and aside from the extremely rare one-liner that lands, smaller chuckles aren’t really there, either.
Though Simon West knows his way around an action movie, that touch is long gone here, based on the erratic editing and graceless shooting style. There’s definitely elaborate fight choreography on display and, sure, there’s the momentarily clever use of curling irons as nunchucks and sprinklers as electrical shocks, but it’s all chopped up and slapped together to a distracting degree. So many action scenes show the seams where Wilson is blatantly replaced by a stunt person whenever her blonde hair is obscuring her face (somehow even when it’s up in an Ariana Grande-style pony tail); is this one of those hacky Friedberg/Seltzer “spoofs” like Date Movie and Epic Movie where a shameless lack of continuity is intended to be the joke? A kitchen fight scene gets set to Ginger Spice’s “It’s Raining Men,” and it’s as mind-boggling as it sounds. Most egregious of all, though, is a climactic chase on a seemingly endless stretch of Savannah land. It’s a visual embarrassment of bad green screen, not even trying to make its actors look like they’re occupying the same space or performing any stunts of their own.
Rebel Wilson has been a hilariously uninhibited dynamo before, but this is not one of her finest hours. One wonders if her Fat Amy character finally kicking ass in Pitch Perfect 3 was the genesis we get to thank for this movie. Despite Wilson and Anna Camp working together before, they had more natural chemistry as a group than they do one on one here. It also doesn’t help that the script by Shaina Steinberg hardly sets the groundwork for us to care too deeply if Sam and Betsy get past their friendship rift. Third-act attempts at poignancy around a fire do not feel earned.
Aside from the innocent Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who can at least sell some lazy shtick), no one is done many favors. Anna Chlumsky, a wonderful actress, is left to mug and give uptight faces. Gigi Zumbado (who was so effervescent and funny as the comic-relief bestie in slasher rom-com Heart Eyes) gets far less funny stuff to work with as bridesmaid Zoe, except be pregnant and be mad at her spineless husband. Stephen Dorff is reliably menacing in Generic Bad Guy mode; Justin Hartley has some fun playing with his hunky image as the best man; and Sherry Cola is also in here somewhere, given a nothing part as Sam’s handler, but we’ll always have Joy Ride and Shortcomings.
If there was ever any hope for Bride Hard, it would take a whole rewiring, using the same actors but ditching the whole “My best friend is a secret agent!” bit and maybe punching up the comedy. Alas, that isn’t the movie we got. Outside of these actors bringing energy on the screen, there is nothing to recommend surrounding them — not a joke, not an action set-piece, not a standout performance. (Okay, the bridesmaid dresses are pretty.) It’s possible that the cast had a blast making this, but while they get to pretend they’re being held hostage, imagine how the audience feels enduring this technically shoddy, almost laugh-free bust.
Rating: 1/5
Bride Hard hits theaters on June 20, 2025.
