Picked as her best friend's maid of honor, lovelorn and broke Annie looks to bluff her way through the expensive and bizarre rituals with an oddball group of bridesmaids.
The delightful Kristen Wiig, who's shone in dozens of supporting roles and onSaturday Night Live, hits a bull's-eye with her first lead role inBridesmaids. Annie (Wiig) isn't doing so well; her bakery failed and she keeps sleeping with a good-looking louse (Jon Hamm,Mad Men), but she's always had her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph,Away We Go) to buoy her up… until Lillian gets engaged. Annie becomes maid of honor, but another friend of Lillian's--the rich and lovely Helen (Rose Byrne,Get Him to the Greek)--wants to take over that position. Misadventures with bad Brazilian food, dress fittings, an unfortunate flight to Vegas, and a sympathetic traffic cop (Chris O'Dowd from British TV comedyThe IT Crowd) follow, with increasingly hilarious results.Bridesmaidssuccessfully balances raunchy comedy and character portrait. The embarrassing and socially catastrophic stuff, which in too many movies balloons into absurdity, is here kept in check just enough to allow Annie and the other characters to be multidimensional people--without the movie losing its comic capacity for cringe. (Actress Melissa McCarthy, ofMike & Molly, works miracles with a character than in most hands would be pure cartoon.) Wiig's enormous appeal keeps Annie sympathetic, even as she becomes more ...
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