VIDEO: The trailer for Bride Wars
There are no pleasant surprises in this partly-Boston-shot Gary Winick film. A vehicle for high-end product placement disguised as a "frenemy" comedy, it's chixploitation at its creative nadir (and that's low).
The meringue-brained plot gets rolling when the boyfriends of bestest pals Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway propose. Since childhood, the gals have dreamt of June weddings at New York's Plaza. When a screw-up results in their being booked for simultaneous Plaza nuptials and neither deigns to change her date, the battle erupts.
The resulting sabotages are goofy and obvious. (Look, Kate has blue hair!) Hudson, as the dom to Hathaway's sub, withholds her megawatt smile until the cathartic climax. Hathaway, whose character finds gumption through pranking, almost erases memories of her acting stretch in that other wedding movie when she joins Hudson in shrieking, "Tiffany box!" The young actors are interchangeable, and Candice Bergen, as a top wedding planner, performs with a distracted quality that could well have been necessary for self-preservation.
