Bride Hard

Bride Hard, an action-comedy that feels behind the times and destined to disappoint, stars Rebel Wilson as Sam, a secret agent whose covert heroics are unknown to even her oldest and dearest friend, Betsy (fellow Pitch Perfect veteran Anna Camp).

Betsy is getting married and has asked Sam to be her maid of honor, which makes for a Paris-set bachelorette party opening sequence in which Sam has to sneak off to disarm baddies. Sam’s inexplicable absenteeism gets her dropped as maid of honor in favor of Virginia (Anna Chlumsky), the bride’s high-strung, sister-in-law to be.

We jump to the day of the wedding itself, an event hosted at the sprawling Savannah, Georgia estate of the wealthy family into which Betsy is marrying. Things take a turn when a group of mercenaries, led by the gravely Kurt (Stephen Dorff), hijack the wedding with guns in tow, their eyes set on the family vault.

Bride Hard feels like it would have been greenlit around the time that Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher made 2010’s Killers. But seeing as how comedies in general have largely vanished from theaters, that is not especially distressing. Tastes are cyclical and throwbacks certainly have their place. Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine Bride Hard being to anyone’s taste at any time. This falls short both as a comedy and an action film, the two genres at odds throughout instead of working together as intended.

Wilson, who turned 45 in March, has beaten the industry’s long odds repeatedly. The Australian comic had a brief but clear breakthrough moment as one of Kristen Wiig’s roommates in Bridesmaids (2011), a small part that led to her signature role as “Fat Amy” in the Pitch Perfect trilogy. Wilson’s scene-stealing comic relief energy led to leading roles in movies like the 2019 romcom send-up Isn’t It Romantic, the two-hander The Hustle (2019) with Anne Hathaway, and Netflix’s Senior Year (2022). Over the course of those few years, Wilson reinvented herself, slimming down from the weight that aligned with her Pitch Perfect character’s nickname to something more resembling a Hollywood leading lady.

Alas, Bride Hard isn’t the kind of Hollywood movie a lady dreams of leading. This messy, laughless affair has “bad movie” stench all over it. With the exception of the cosmic experience that is The Room, there aren’t many truly bad movies I’ve seen in theaters. I remember catching Jamie Kennedy’s Kickin’ It Old Skool on the day before it was to lose over 70% of its theaters two weeks into its disappointing spring 2007 run. That theater was empty and my expectations were, more or less, met. Bride Hard was an advanced press screening, one of three I attended this week and certainly the most elaborate. There was free glitter popcorn and a white chocolate fountain for foundueing strawberries and pirouettes. This was the ideal scenario for enjoying the movie and, even so, chuckles were sparse.

Like many, I’ve found Wilson to be an entertaining presence. But I’ve now seen enough of her vehicles to suspect she’s better suited to side comic relief than front-and-center action star. The chick flick wedding fare and action shenanigans are fused together so haphazardly that we’re never in the right mindset to enjoy either. It’s hard to believe that director Simon West’s debut, 1997’s Con Air, is as fondly remembered as it is.

I kept wanting some of the jokes or thrills to land, for the sake of the cast, which includes not just the agreeable aforementioned actresses, but also recent Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Jungle 2 Jungle star Sam Huntington, and “Phil of the Future” dad Craig Anton. Randolph shot this before The Holdovers opened, so let’s cut her some slack. The movie does not give the other two much of note to do.

In fact, even clear lead Wilson somehow feels underutilized, as she hangs on the sidelines as we’re subjected to a muddled and entirely uninteresting “eat the rich” narrative that unfolds with Stephen Dorff monologues. Wilson’s Senior Year co-star Justin Hartley (star of the CBS action series “Tracker”) also features prominently, perpetually treading a line between love interest and villain that seems just as confusing to screenwriters Cece Pleasants (“The Late Late Show with James Corden”) and Shaina Steinberg as it is to us.

Bride Hard, the second domestic release acquired by veteran producer Bob Yari’s young Magenta Light Studios, is just one of three wide releases on a summer weekend that historically has performed well, but it seems thoroughly overmatched by the indirect competition of Pixar’s Elio and Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later.