Fridae

Bridesmaids pitches itself as an R-rated chick flick. A more honest reviewer would describe it as a gender-reversed frat-pack comedy with girls revelling in bawdy humour, behaving like pigs and passive aggressive men-children, and throwing in a fart joke or two. Produced by Judd Apatow, Bridesmaids is what you’d get if you put Paul Rudd, Vince Vaughn, Zach Galifiankis, et al in skirts and released them to improvise heavily on a set. At best, you’ll get a raunchy comedy that deconstructs gender. At worst, you’ll see women behave unrealistically, improbably, but hilariously. What’s to lose?

Annie (aka Vince Vaughn in a wig and skirt) is a down-and-out, unemployed single woman who has only one thing to cheer her up these days: the impending marriage of her best friend Lillian (aka Paul Rudd in a wig and skirt). The preparations for the wedding, the bridal shower, and the bachelorette party should distract Annie from her crapsack life and provide the audience with gloriously R-rated sketches that flesh out the script’s high concepts of gender-reversed male bonding and male passive-aggressive behaviour.

Kirstin Wiig and the cast gamely participate in this experimental comedy, with Wiig executing pratfalls and other scenery destroying stunts. While Bridesmaids does confirm Wiig as a female comedy lead, it also solidifies Melissa McCarthy as the female analogue of the scene-stealing Zach Galifianakis.

I suspect that your reception to Bridesmaids will depend on just how much of the premise you can swallow. The jokes here are as funny as what we’ve seen in Apatow’s usual films. The question is whether they’re just as funny with women acting them out, even if women in real life don’t behave anything like this. If this sounds like science fiction to you (or alternatively, a comedy written by an alien with no clue about humanity), skip it. Otherwise, it’s an experimental comedy that might just work in spite of its weird premise.