Bridesmaids movie overview

Kristen Wiig, the US comedienne and star of Saturday Night Live, has large blue eyes that easily transmit incredulity and a pair of stork-like legs that lend themselves to clowning. When we first see her character Annie in Bridesmaids, the legs are thrashing comically in a bout of flamboyantly bad sex with her on-off bed-partner Ted (Jon Hamm of Mad Men, gamely playing a supremely self-satisfied prat). Next, they are dangling atop a security gate, which she is attempting to climb over when it’s unexpectedly set in motion.
Annie has recently lost both her bakery business and her boyfriend, and Ted’s habit of saying “I’d really like you to go now” with a broad smile after sex is slowly shattering any illusion of a new relationship. So it is not the best time to hear that her best friend Lilian (Maya Rudolph) is getting married, a move which catapults them both into the costly, fevered froth of dress fittings, bachelorette parties and bridal showers.
Penniless Annie irons on a brave face and gets to work organising events in her role as matron of honour, only to find that a sleeker, richer, more recent confidante, Helen (Rose Byrne) is using the occasion to establish herself as Lilian’s official number-one friend. Covert hostilities between the two step up to outright war as Annie comes close to losing her mind and wrecking the entire wedding.

If Bridesmaids is perhaps not as groundbreaking as the hype suggests – Bridget Jones’s Diary propelled its heroine through similar embarrassments – it is none the less infinitely fresher and funnier than anything else the stale rom-com market has produced of late.
Wiig, who co-wrote the screenplay, is superb on the details of female rivalry: the lukewarm enthusiasm that is code for outright rejection and the rage bubbling beneath an eroding veneer of pleasantry. She has a knack as a performer, too, for rendering bad-taste humour funny rather than offensive. Her Annie resembles a slightly out-of-control child in an adult body, blurting out the things that most people only think.
Judd Apatow, the producer, coarsens things unnecessarily by shoehorning in an unlikely, scatological scene in which the bridesmaids are simultaneously struck with a stomach bug while trying on dresses in a bridal boutique. But the talented cast of actresses strike one as game for anything: in particular, the scene-stealing Melissa McCarthy as Megan, a disarmingly confident, heavyweight straight-talker incongruously garnished with a pearl necklace.
It takes a strong man to survive in this unleashed torrent of oestrogen, and Chris O’Dowd manages it, as an Irish traffic cop who has more wit and pride than most movie love interests.