Bride Wars: Critic Reviews

Bride Wars pretends to be a satire of wedding mania, but since there's virtually nothing else to the movie, the satire comes depressingly close to endorsement.

A dopey if largely painless romantic comedy

Our deepest condolences to Hudson as the ironically named "Liv". Her dead eyes and rouged cheeks suggest she's bypassed the wedding and gone straight to the funeral.

Unless skirmishes in the bridal registry department or catfights in yards of tulle sound like fun, opt for peaceful resistance to Bride Wars.

Predictable, lazy and as overprocessed as Kate Hudson's hair, this thoroughly joyless movie also possesses a deep nasty streak, making it loathsome when it might have been merely annoying.

It's a chick flick; nothing wrong with that. But it's also a chick flick that makes its chick characters -- and by extension its chick audience -- look like hateful, backward toddlers, and there is something wrong with that.

It would be depressing to think that people like this might actually exist. But it's also a little depressing to think that movies like this actually exist, so you can never be too sure.

No cues are needed to understand the plot, which feels computer-generated and barely serves to sustain an hour and a half running time.

It's been awhile since a movie has been this stridently insufferable while pulling off that moviemaking trifecta of combining bad directing, bad writing and bad acting.

The film wanly tries to build a case for their two very different, yet complementary, personalities but falls back on slapstick. The filmmakers make thankfully swift work of the tale in just under 90 minutes.

Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, who play the would-be brides, are good actors and quick-witted women, here playing characters at a level of intelligence approximating HAL 9000 after he has had his chips pulled.

The timing of this picture's release is unfortunate, as is the picture itself.

With artifice as layered as the tiers of a marzipan cake, this resembles nothing so much as a stale Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedy: you know that eventually the combatants will recognize they love each other the most.

How bad can a movie be, with Goldilocks Hudson and Cinderella Hathaway? So excruciating that Hudson's sunshine can't warm it and Hathaway's rose redolence can't mask its stink.

It's apathy incarnate. It's the Bride of Floppenstein, a C-minus, a soggy, sad thing floating in a lukewarm limbo of sentimental mediocrity.

Setting feminism back at least a century, embarrassing a potential Oscar nominee and insulting the very idea of romance, Bride Wars is every bit as awful as it sounds.

The movie ends with the door wide open for a sequel; one can't imagine anyone involved jumping at the thought.

A shrill, mechanical comedy dedicated to the proposition that a wedding that doesn't take place at the Plaza Hotel is scarcely worth having at all.

Anything you need to know to avoid wasting your $12 is in the unpromising trailer.

It's a picture that never comes to life before the "death do us part."

Director Gary Winick has long since abandoned his cool cred from Tadpole and 13 Going on 30 and given himself over to the dark side of making glossy amusements that are about as deep as staring into a snow globe.

Bride Wars is hell at its most banal -- like watching a dull sitcom with a broken remote.

Even if you can get past the boneheaded premise, the picture feels halfhearted in its construction.

There's more cheer to be gained from staring outside at a bleak and desolate winterscape in the twilight of a shortened day than paying good money to endure this example of cinematic offal.