It's Likable, but that's about all.

Rating: 6/10 (9 April 2015)

Bridesmaids is a silly and watchable 2011 comedy that provides relatively consistent laughs throughout but suffers from the same disease that is afflicting a lot of contemporary comedies these days: The nucleus of a very funny movie is here, but attempts to pad the screenplay with unnecessary subplot and exposition really slow down the proceedings.
The film stars Kristen Wiig (who also co-wrote the screenplay) as Annie Walker, a woman thrilled that her BFF Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is engaged and that Lillian has asked Annie to be her maid of honor. Things get complicated when Annie meets another bridesmaid named Helen (Rose Byrne), a snooty socialite who is marred to Lillian's fiancée's father, who Annie believes is trying to replace her as maid of honor. This part of the movie totally works and the scene where Annie and Helen are trying to get the last word during the wedding toasts is probably the funniest scene in the movie.
The movie suffers when it moves to a romantic triangle between Annie, her current boyfriend (Jon Hamm), a slimeball who treats her like dirt and the cop she meets cute with (Chris O'Dowd). This subplot just brings the movie down because Wiig had way more chemistry with Hamm than she did with O'Dowd. I never bought the relationship with O'Dowd and maybe this is why it was felt necessary to show us how lonely Annie really is. We actually got a 10 minute scene of Annie baking a very elaborate cupcake, which seemed like a gift for a boyfriend but she eats it herself, easily the film's most pointless scene.
The movie suffers when it moves to a romantic triangle between Annie, her current boyfriend (Jon Hamm), a slimeball who treats her like dirt and the cop she meets cute with (Chris O'Dowd). This subplot just brings the movie down because Wiig had way more chemistry with Hamm than she did with O'Dowd. I never bought the relationship with O'Dowd and maybe this is why it was felt necessary to show us how lonely Annie really is. We actually got a 10 minute scene of Annie baking a very elaborate cupcake, which seemed like a gift for a boyfriend but she eats it herself, easily the film's most pointless scene.