Bridesmaids revisited

Rating: 3/10 (27 December 2011)

In my defence I didn't get "The Hangover" either, the brother to the sister here. This, for me, was an overlong, only occasionally amusing modern comedy peopled with that contrasting combination of weird and supposedly normal people, put into supposed comedic situations by a bachelorette party staged for a prospective bride. Thus we get the creepily strange fat couple that rooms with Kristen Wiig's Annie and the even more overweight (the bigger the waistline, the stranger the persona appears to be the rule here) groom's sister with a penchant for puppy dogs and a flair for picking-out air-marshals on plane-flights who attempts to bond with Wiig at her lowest ebb. The story, if I can call it that, is told from Wiig's point of view and starts immediately with her engaging in casual sex with a guy who kicks her out of bed by morning and to whom she's no better than his number three shag. Some humour does emerge as she gets into a bidding competition at the engagement party of her best friend's Maya Randolph's new best-friend, the super-rich, super beautiful Helen, well-played by Rose Byrne but after that the humour gets scatological at a posh bridal-wear shop, drunken on board an aborted plane flight to Vegas and finally kooky and at times surreal encounter with an off-beat cop with whom she makes an unlikely connection. Of course it all ends up happily at the wedding, her best-friend credentials to the bride re- established as they belt out Wilson Phillips' feminist anthem "Hold On" and she gets reunited with her cop but by then the laugh count had dropped even more. I'm vaguely aware that this strain of humour mixing gross, crazy people with so-called normals is all the rage - I've not even mentioned Jill Clayburgh as Wiig's, yes you guessed it, wigged-out mother, or some of the other bridesmaids who drop out of the picture after an hour or so, but this slacker humour just doesn't float my boat, especially when it runs way beyond 2 hours in the telling.