Bachelorette

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You know when you’re on a deep dive into Netflix’s back catalogue and you come across a movie that’s packed full of A-listers that you’ve somehow never heard of before? There’s always a reason.

Bachelorette is a deeply offensive and rarely funny movie that probably meant to be Deep Impact to Bridesmaids’ Armageddon, but wasn’t. It stars Rebel Wilson as bride-to-be Becky and Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan, and Isla Fisher as her horrible best friends. This trio are quite cruel to Becky, to her face and behind her back. They discuss amongst themselves how impossible it is that their fat friend is the first to be married, and to a good catch at that – rich, handsome, and totally in love with her. They’re jealous, they’re mean, and they’re determined to fuck up her wedding.

On the eve of the wedding, Becky heads to bed while her “friends” get drunk and do coke and fail to find a single ounce of happiness for the bride. In a fit of particular cruelty, Regan (Dunst) and Katie (Fisher) decide to try on Becky’s dress, without permission, and at the same time. The dress does as most would do when taxed with two wearers: it rips down the middle. The rest of the evening is spent in a “hilarious” race to somehow fix the dress before the morning wedding. They’ll get more drunk and do more drugs, and cross paths with the bachelor party on more than one occasion. The dress will be dragged along the sidewalk, get tossed in the trash, and be besmirched by several bodily fluids. And through it all, none of these women ever feels bad or learns a lesson. They’re disgusting human beings but they never face a consequence and they never get called out. I’m half afraid the script doesn’t even realize that they’re pathetic, ugly people.

Bridesmaids was crude and edgy, serving up women behaving badly with style though not always class. It got away with it because underpinning the gross gags and lewd humour was an essential sweetness and an elemental bond that made its hot mess relatable, and grounded. This movie is anarchic but tonally confused, and its characters hideously irredeemable. Even ringing its theme for all it was worth, the film failed to squeeze out even a drop of entertainment. There’s a reason I’d never heard of this movie – I just wish that had stayed the case.

8 thoughts on “Bachelorette”

  4. Robert Jantzen

    We saw Bachelorette some time ago (Ouch!) and you nailed it. This nation has been leaning cruel and crueler in recent times, sadly, and this reflects that trend. But Bridesmaids, yes! We’ve seen that multiple times. You summed it up with the “sweetness” factor, indeed a big part of that sweetness was Chris O’Dowd’s subplot, his breakout role. Then he hit mainstream again in St Vincent as the bumbling Brother Geraghty in a Catholic school, followed by his role in Juliet, Naked. With the rise of streaming in more recent years we went back to stream some of his older stuff and binged The IT Crowd series, a sort of sweetness merged with Dumb and Dumber with a touch of Moonlighting male female tension, and then The Sapphires about an Aborigine girl group touring Vietnam during the war where he falls for the lead singer who has a “nontraditional” body filled with… the sweetness factor, that Chris exudes in all these roles. Sorry for going off on a tangent, but why not? Now I see (and just read) the link to The Map of Tiny Perfect Things which I missed before. By chance last night we caught that film and yes, not cinematic history but a satisfying watch with that sweetness factor. Thanks for your kind heart!

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  5. Robert Jantzen

    And as for terrible movies with A-listers, check out They Came Together (2014) with Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler… but the top IMDB review liked it. Let’s face it, we all have different tastes in movies. Which is a real problem for more than one person trying to find a common stream!

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