BRIDE HARD - Mark Reviews Movies

Bride Hard, Magenta Light Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 19, 2025

With this cast, Bride Hard should be somewhat amusing and show some sense that the people involved in making it were having a bit of fun. It isn't even that and only makes us hope the cast had as pleasant accommodations as the ones of the location of the story's destination wedding.

The premise of Shaina Steinberg's screenplay is, at least, a bit promising. It features Sam (Rebel Wilson), an agent for some super-top-secret intelligence organization, and her efforts to balance her professional and personal lives. At the moment, she's in Paris (France, a title helps us, in case anyone believes the Eiffel Tower is in Texas, apparently) on a mission to stop the sale of a deadly biological weapon.

Sam, also serving as the maid of honor for her best friend Betsy (Anna Camp), has also moved the bachelorette party to the city to be able to do both. After Sam disappears for a long stretch to save the world again, Betsy's other bridesmaids convince the bride-to-be that Sam isn't reliable enough to be her maid of honor. Since Sam can't tell anyone why she's so often absent, she just has to accept it.

Early on, the movie establishes that its action-comedy ambitions are going to rely primarily on the second part of that description. The chase and standoff in Paris make that seem like a decent idea, especially if the alternative is that director Simon West leans into the poor staging and almost magical editing of that opening action sequence. West, who has been in the actioner game for several decades at this point, can't be entirely blamed for how terrible some of this looks and how much worse the action eventually becomes. The whole affair seems cobbled together from a one-joke idea, with little concern for how to develop any of its characters or sense of humor. The logistics of the script's plot and action were obviously even less of a worry.

As the title suggests, this becomes one of those one-person army against a group of heavily armed criminals in an isolated location. The location is a private island off the coast of Georgia, where Betsy to marry Ryan (Sam Huntington), the son of a wealthy family, surrounded by family and friends, including other bridesmaids Lydia (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), pregnant Zoe (Gigi Zumbado), and future sister-in-law Virginia (Anna Chlumsky).

Sam's handler (played by Sherry Cola) convinces her to attend the wedding after the falling out to help the agent's mental state, but sure enough, a group of thieves, led by Kurt (Stephen Dorff), crash the wedding. They want to steal gold hidden in a vault with strict, elaborate, and timed security measures (that become much more flexible, apparently, whenever the movie has messed up its continuity).

It's best to dismiss the action of this movie outright, simply because it becomes increasingly incompetent as the movie proceeds. Little of it makes sense, whether it be Sam "sneakily" taking down guards in broad daylight and in full view of people or how mercenaries with automatic weapons can't seem to a hit a target right in front of them, and much it looks terrible, especially during a climactic chase/fight that includes several green-screen shots that don't even seem to care about trying to make the action look real.

One imagines the filmmakers would like us to ignore the action anyway (even if the movie is filled with it), because the comedy is clearly the first goal. That's pretty much a dead end, too.

The characters here are broadly defined (Randolph plays a sex-crazed woman, for example, and Chlumsky's character is just a jerk) and seem to exist solely to make jokes, be silly, or spout one-liners no matter the situation. The material couldn't have functioned as an actioner even if it wanted to, simply because every bit of dialogue and every setup here serves to undermine the stakes and potential tension of the premise. Instead, the movie feels as if it's forcing gags into the story and then hitting the same ones over and over again. It's tiresome.

As for Wilson, her performance is an odd one in this context. In general, she can be funny, to be sure. For whatever reason, though, the actress decides to play the character mostly straight here, apart from a few intentionally awkward puns and some absurd bits, such as, for example, using curling irons like nunchakus. Bride Hard makes one mistake after another, basically, in everything it sets out to do.

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