Bachelorette

Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette is an unfunny, miserable experience that toddles around for 90 minutes with three people so obnoxious that you wouldn’t want to share an elevator ride with them.  It is a comedy that strives to be an earthier recreation of Bridesmaids and The Hangover, but it is neither as clever, nor as funny as either of those great films.  This movie is aggressively bad.

What is worse is that the three leads are played by three otherwise good actresses.  Kirsten Dunst, just off her triumphant performance as a bride facing the end of the world in Melancholia plays Regan, a girl pushing 30 who has done everything right with her life and can’t understand why some rich, gorgeous hunky bozo hasn’t swept her off her feet.  At her side are best pals Katie and Gena.  Katie is a party girl who spends most of her time coked-up or drunk.  She’s played by Isla Fisher who has been wonderful in films like The Wedding Crashers and Confessions of a Shopaholic.  Gena, played by Lizzy Caplan is just as coked-up and spends her time pining for an old boyfriend who has clearly moved on.

The story kicks off when the three friends are asked to be bridesmaids to a girl they once ridiculed back in high school.  She is Becky (Rebel Wilson), a sensitive overweight girl that they once called “Pig Face.”  Why she called these people to be part of her special day is a mystery left unsolved.  The night before the wedding, Becky’s friends gather for her bachelorette party at a hotel where, naturally, a stripper shows up dressed as a cop.  In the midst of his gyrating, he calls the bride-to-be “Pig-face”, and Becky is (naturally) so offended that she brings the party to a dead halt.

In Becky’s absence, the drunk Regan and Katie think it might be funny to climb into the wedding dress at the same time so that they can post the picture on Facebook.  In the midst of their cruel joke, the dress rips and the next hour of the movie is spent trying to find some possible way to get it fixed.  That means we get a long series of misadventures as they run around Manhattan in a panic, yelling at potential tailors when they aren’t drinking, snorting cocaine or hooking up.  What is truly sad is that the trio seems more concerned with Becky’s wedding dress then they ever did with her feelings.

Between the the drugs, the sluttiness and their hateful demeanor, Regan, Katie and Gena are the most obnoxious trio you’ll ever meet.  They have no feelings.  They fight all the time.  They’re cruel, hateful, mean-spirited and self-pitying.  They are all pushing 30 and are too stoned and ignorant to figure why they’re miserable.  Then the movie has the gall to ask for our sympathies.  As the movie grinds toward its third act (which is wall-to-wall with pre-wedding clichés), these three nitwits get serious and we get to see them fall into a pattern of pseudo-sensitive self-examination.  At that point, we in the audience just want them to go away.

On the sidelines is poor Becky, played in a brave performance by Rebel Wilson, who exists around the edges of the film when she should be center stage. She’s a pretty girl with a nervous smile and a good heart, and is (based on who she calls friends) apparently very forgiving.  She has a few fleeting moments when she shows some humanity but they are cut way too short.

Bachelorette is based on a very dark 2010 play that hopefully came off better than the movie.  There are scenes in this film that are just nauseating.  Did we really need a five-minute monologue of Gena’s theories about fellatio?  Did we need the sight of Katie vomiting into a bathtub?  Did we need a best man toast that includes lewd descriptions of what he did to one of the bridesmaids the night before? This movie dares you to like it.