Review: Not-so-beautiful ‘Bride’

Not having fun yet: Kate Hudson, left, and Anne Hathaway play bickering pals in “Bride Wars.” (Courtesy photo)

SAN FRANCISCO — It is a matter of unfortunate timing that Anne Hathaway’s latest trip to the chapel follows so closely on the heels of her Golden Globe-nominated turn in “Rachel Getting Married.”

In that film, she plays a cynical, self-loathing addict released from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding, jolting her dysfunctional family into a state of awkward self-awareness with her caustic outpourings.

It’s a devastating performance, delivered with an air of damaged authenticity and a far cry from Hathaway’s earlier work in saccharine fantasies like “The Princess Diaries.”

If anything positive can be said for “Bride Wars,” which finds her wading through a cesspool of infantile banality and sitcom clichés, it is that Hathaway is the movie’s greatest and only asset.

She dominates the screen with ease, exuding just the sort of irrepressible energy and charm that the script so sorely lacks. But in choosing such pedestrian material, she has done a disservice to her audience and to herself.

It is widely assumed that Eddie Murphy hurt his Oscar chances by following his dramatic turn in “Dreamgirls” with the graceless “Norbit.” “Bride Wars” is just as abysmal, though it spares us the prosthetic fat suits.

Instead, Gary Winick’s tone-deaf farce pits Hathaway against Kate Hudson as lifelong best friends whose weddings fall on the same day. Neither cares to reschedule, and what begins as a clumsy clerical error quickly escalates into a fierce exchange of predictable pranks and mean-spirited betrayals.

What’s love got to do with it? Nothing, really.

“Bride Wars” keeps its boys on the sidelines, where they are left to shake their heads as the women in their lives embrace their inner she-devils. (Weddings, it seems, are concessions to the fairer sex, with men on hand as glorified window dressing.) Hathaway and Hudson share the less enviable task of trying to pass off the film’s creative desperation as inspired lunacy.

Had the filmmakers truly committed themselves to the anarchic spirit of their premise, “Bride Wars” might have worked as a dark comedy, skewering obsessive brides-to-be with the same razor-sharp blade Danny DeVito took to disgruntled married couples in his “War of the Roses.”

But this is tame stuff, resolved in a flash of sentimentality so sickly artificial it could easily be mistaken for a slice of plastic cheese.

MOVIE REVIEW

Bride Wars *

Starring: Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Bryan Greenberg, Chris Pratt, Steve Howey, Candice Bergen
Written by Greg DePaul, Casey Wilson, June Diane Raphael
Directed by Gary Winick
Rated PG
Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes