The Entire Plot Of 'Bride Hard' Recreated With Quotes From Scathing Reviews
Rebel Wilson and Oscar winner Da'Vine Joy Randolph star in a Die Hard/Bridesmaids' mash-up from the director 'Con Air' that you probably missed (judging by the box office).
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You could be forgiven for not noticing that a Rebel Wilson action-comedy from the director of Con Air and Tomb Raider (Simon West) opened a few weeks ago. It seems like it was by design. The press tour for Bride Hard has been non-existent, and I didn’t see a single ad for it. It was shot in 2023 and didn’t have a US distributor until January. To date, it has grossed just north of $350,000 worldwide.
Time was, studios tried to make the premises of their comedies as succinct as possible. The concept was the title was the poster was the trailer. For the most part it seems like the success of Neighbors, and its crushingly blunt “Frat vs. Family” marketing campaign, spawned a flood of imitators (“dad vs. stepdad,” Tag, Game Night), mostly of diminishing returns. I wrote about this phenomenon in 2018, and seven years later, it seems like the approach has gotten too hackneyed even for John Q. Dipshit. Either that, or people just aren’t as exposed movie advertising as they used to be — at least, short of a gajillion-dollar, multi-pronged marketing blitz a lá F1. (I think they’re advertising this one in my sleep now. Is that possible?)
Whatever the case, it seems Bride Hard was still operating under 2015 rules, trying to make its conceptual mash-up of Bridesmaids and Die Hard as immediately parsible as possible. Why see it when you already know exactly the commercial calculus that produced it from the title?
When I realized it existed, I thought about seeing it out of sheer morbid curiosity (I actually have a soft spot for Rebel Wilson; jokes are always funnier to me in Australian). But there’s no genre I find more tedious than the half-assed comedy mashed up with the half-assed action movie. What if you could have two genres that no one committed to?
And yet that also made it perfect for Plot Recreated With Reviews. That’s when we try to recreate the entire plot of a film using only expository quotes from the reviews (no analysis!). For movies that you’re sort of curious about but don’t actually want to sit through, it’s actually much more entertaining to hear them described by bored, annoyed film critics. There’s a subtle magic to the way every critic chooses to highlight slightly different shitty details. As Vincent Vega once said, “It’s the little differences.”
So here it is, Rebel Wilson and Simon West’s Bride Hard, in the words of the 15 or 20 critics who actually saw it.
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ACT 1
Bride Hard offers a lot of exposition, really, really fast. (Chicago Reader)
Wilson plays Sam, who was BFFs with Betsy (Anna Camp) in childhood before presumably moving to Australia, which would explain the otherwise unexplained accent. (Washington Post)
She makes her childhood bestie move her entire bachelorette party to Paris on four days’ notice just so she can attend. (AV Club)
(“France,” per a helpful intertitle, in case you were wondering), (Washington Post)
It introduces us to a squad of bridesmaids walking through the airport with freeze frames, overlaid text, and arrows. (Chicago Reader)
A bachelorette party in Paris is the dream for plenty of brides, but things are already tense between Betsy and Sam, (Indiewire)
a.k.a. Agent Dragonfly. (NY Times)
In the intervening years, Sam has become a superspy for an unspecified government agency (Washington Post)
whose preposterous cover story is one of the screenplay’s funnier jokes, and who’s barely had time to participate in the countless bachelorette rituals for the bride-to-be. (NYTimes)
…thrusting male strippers dressed as Vikings… (AP) [Sorry, this was all I could get of the actual bachelorette party]
Absent and flaky thanks to her woefully nondescript superintelligence work, Sam is introduced through a sequence that sees her juggling plot points from “27 Dresses,” slapstick beats akin to “Spy,” and Anna Chlumsky as her intense type-A competitor. A fellow bridesmaid and Betsy’s future sister-in-law, Virginia can’t wait to swoop in and take over when Sam screws up. (Indiewire)
DEMOTED
After ghosting the celebration but nailing her mission (Chicago Reader)
to retrieve a stolen weapon of mass destruction, they decide Sam is a bad friend and demote her from the Maid of Honor to a measly bridesmaid. (The Wrap)
A tearful Betsy hands the title to Virginia, (Chicago Reader)
a control freak expertly brought to passive-aggressive life by Anna Chlumsky. (NY Times)
It’s an unshocking and deserved demerit for a “best friend” who has prioritized busts over Betsy for too long. (Chicago Reader)
“I will give you all of your flowers on the job, but in your real life, you’re kind of dumb,” says her agent friend, played by Sherry Cola. (AP) [Yes, there is apparently another Asian-American actor-comedienne named after a bottled beverage]
Instead of contrasting Sam’s hyperconfident spycraft with her social inelegance or fake cat-lady alias, Wilson just plays both sides of Sam as, well, Rebel Wilson—deadpan, sarcastic, and prone to repeating random words under her breath in the hopes that one of them lands like a joke. (AV Club)
DORFF HARD
Celebrating in Savannah, Georgia (yippee-ki-yay for tax breaks!), the happy couple hosts their wedding at an idyllic southern estate, (Indiewire)
a private island that looks like the plantation wedding destination of a girl’s “lost cause” dreams. (Washington Post)
(The film goes out of its way to say there are secret Underground Railroad tunnels, but the plantation is on a tiny island and the tunnels don’t run underwater.) (The Wrap)
A torrent of floral prints and pastels greets the now ex-maid of honor Sam, who, even robbed of her handguns, is giving “spy” by wearing all black. Soon, Betsy and her fiancé, Ryan (Sam Huntington), will both be beneficiaries to the Caldwell family’s vast whiskey fortune. (Indiewire)
Before anyone can shed a single tear, the wedding is broken up by a criminal army led by a gun-toting, sunglasses-wearing Stephen Dorff (Chicago Reader)
who is in pursuit of (NY Times)
a pallet of gold bars. (Gold bars, like it’s a Looney Tunes cartoon.) (AP)
He takes the entire wedding hostage, (Chicago Reader)
demanding access to a secret vault. (AV Club)
Minutes after they’re taken hostage, several of the wedding party engage in a singalong for no reason. (Hollywood Reporter)
A stressed-out pregnant bridesmaid requests another sing the nasty, freaky “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)” to her unborn baby, which triggers a sing-a-long with all the captives, mostly white, rich and middle aged. The moviemakers go with the radio edit. (AP)
Meanwhile, Sam puts her skills to use by skulking around the property and picking off baddies one by one. (Hollywood Reporter)
FUNNY ACTION
Watching Sam beat a man with curling irons (Indiewire)
used as nun-chucks (Washington Post)
before stabbing him with a cake stand resembles something like fun, (Indiewire)
minus a point for the non-zinger “Oh no, your masturbating hand” when she burns a goon with one. (HollywoodReporter)
Lots of real blood, fiery explosions, impalings and electrocutions, along with irritable bowel syndrome jokes and plenty of kicks to the groin… (AP)
a key prop is a Civil War cannon. (NYTimes)
The bridesmaids — all in fluffy red gowns — use Revolutionary-era cannons to take on trained mercenaries in tactical gear with rocket-propelled grenades. That, of course, leads to plenty of jokes about “ramming it in.” (AP)
…dick jokes and lackluster random-core comedy… (Chicago Reader)
Rebel Wilson’s shoddy kitchen-based fight scene is scored to Geri Halliwell’s “It’s Raining Men.” (Guardian)
A glaring continuity gaffe in the final sequence… (NY Times)
…a bad guy’s chest punctured on an hors d’oeuvres platter. Sam likes to wield champagne bottles as clubs... (AP)
…a final chase sequence that’s a mess of low-budget green screen… (AV Club)
…the kind of lazy pacing you’d usually find on the Hallmark Channel and a level of acting not much better than porn. (AP)
FUNNY QUIPS
One sequence includes a wink to film noir that comes out looking more like a stroke, when Sam says, “You’re giving it up like a good whore on the side of the highway.” (Indiewire)
The jokes are witlessly vulgar (sample: “Oh, Sam, you’re alone.” “No, I have my emotional support boobs.”) (Washington Post)