Bride Wars, Blu Ray Review

With some film titles you never really know quite what you’re getting. Bride Wars is not one of those films, it does exactly what it says on the tin! As such, all men out there should know they’re deep in ‘chick flick’ territory here. Not only is it a chick flick, it’s a chick flick for chicks obsessed with weddings!

Liv (Kate Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) have been friends since they were little girls. They both witnessed a wedding in June at the Plaza hotel in New York that left a lasting impression. Since that day both have been obsessed with living out this fantasy, they’re both just waiting for the right guy to pop the question.

With an amazing coincidence (it is a film after all) both girls get proposed to by their respective boyfriends within a coupe of days of each other. After heading to the best wedding planner in New York they find that there are three slots on two dates left in the Plaza in June. Liv takes one date and Emma the other and everything seems to be going swimmingly. It’d be a very boring film if this were the case though, and sure enough a clerical error means that both girls are booked into the two slots on the same day. Nightmare!

Rather than be reasonable about this and come to some kind of agreement, or even have a dual wedding, things start to get nasty between the lifelong friends when they both stubbornly refuse to move their date. Things escalate from harsh words to practical pranks with spray-on-tan and hair dye. Will this date come between them? Will either of them end up making it down the isle alive? If you’re a die-hard chick flick fan then delve in and find out.

I can’t really say this is a romantic comedy. It’s all about weddings so you’d think that’d be the case but a romantic comedy needs to have two people in love. What we have here are two friends who have partners that we’re barely introduced to. The men in this film don’t just get a backseat, they’d be lucky to get that, they’re positively squashed into the car boot as an afterthought. The whole film revolves around Liv and Emma. With Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway in starring roles you wouldn’t think that was a bad thing and indeed their performances are pretty good. The material they’re given however, doesn’t live up to their acting and comedic abilities. Things start out OK, their relationship starts to sour nicely, the witty banter flies. Unfortunately the viewer can see that there are several reasonable options open to both of them to resolve the situation. Their refusal to consider any of them makes you loose sympathy for either of them. As their antics descend into childish, and quite nasty pranks, you actually start to actively dislike them.

We all know that things can’t end that way though and sure enough, there’s an about-turn in the final chapter that gives us the sickly-sweet ending required of a good chick flick. The writers did leave in an option for a sequel as well and I’m not actually sure whether I want to see the option realized or not. I don’t mind a chick flick from time to time. This one however left me a bit cold. I think it might have had something to do with the fact that there were no decent male characters that I could empathize with. Having been married, and listened to my (now) wife banging on about wedding arrangements for what seemed like months, the idea of watching a film where this is two-fold just does not appeal. My wife on the other hand (just to give you a female perspective) quite liked the film, but even she thought the central premise was just unreasonable, even if she did like the comedic antics that followed. The scores below will be from my perspective, for the female readers however, my wife would’ve scored the main movie as a 7.

The video and audio on this Blu Ray are both well above par. Video-wise we’re treated to a very nice 1.85:1, MPEG-4 AVC, 1080p encode and audio-wise we get a 5.1 DTS-HD track that can get quite lively during the more active sequences and retains good, clear dialogue throughout. Extras are the usual fare, deleted scenes, alternative opening, behind the scenes featurettes etc. The most original Blu Ray extra would be the Something Old, Something New feature where wedding trivia pops up during the film playback (one for the girls again though).

Overall this is a an hour and a half of girly light entertainment. It won’t have you rolling in the isles but the main stars drag the most out of what is there and make it watchable.

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