Bride Hard Review
Bride Hard (2025) Film Review, a movie directed by Simon West, written by Cece Pleasants and Shaina Steinberg and starring Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, Anna Chlumsky, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Gigi Zumbado, Sherry Cola, Stephen Dorff, Justin Hartley, Sam Huntington, Michael O’Neill, Colleen Camp, Craig Anton, Leviticus Appleton, Jeff Chase, Brannon Cross, Bethany DeZelle and Cristofher Griffin.
Nobody ever asked for a Die Hard/Bridesmaids crossover, so it’s pretty fair to say director Simon West’s near-disaster, Bride Hard, would have been better off going straight to streaming. That’s not to say the cast that has been assembled for West’s new movie is not top-flight. However, a cast can only go so far to help save a movie when half of them appear to be improvising three quarters of the time. Showing outtakes at the end where performers forget their lines certainly won’t help Bride Hard‘s cause either.
This film isn’t a total washout thanks to the presence of Stephen Dorff as the villain, Kurt. Dorff has a lot of fun here as he goes through with spoofing his bad guy image from 1998’s Blade in a humorous way. Dorff is better at doing this type of role than people may give him credit for. Fairly recent Best Supporting Actress winner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, on the other hand, is totally wasted in a thankless role and she could have certainly been doing other things after her great turn in 2023’s gem, The Holdovers.
Rebel Wilson is the star of Bride Hard. She’s funny, but only to a point. When she gets out of a bumpy situation and states, “Piece of cake,” as pieces of a wedding cake lay around her, it’s ultimately more silly than humorous. This movie is full of lame lines and situations which aren’t the slightest bit believable. As the movie opens, international secret agent Sam (Wilson) is leaving behind her best friend, Betsy (Anna Camp), at a bachelorette party to go take out some bad guys. Betsy is with some male strippers, but still wants Sam with her. When Sam gets back from doing her action hero thing, Betsy offers Sam’s role as “maid of honor” to Virginia (a darker haired Anna Chlumsky of My Girl fame). Sam is hurt, but she’ll get to make it up to Betsy when a mercenary group led by Dorff’s Kurt takes over Betsy’s wedding and secures the attendees as hostages.
Much of the movie is about Sam taking out the bad guys, but there are a lot of other characters vying for screen time such as Justin Hartley as Chris, a guy who has less than noble intentions at the wedding which he was invited to. Hartley falters in his role and the performance is demonstrative of the film’s lack of imagination. Chris comes across as too normal to be involved in the deceitful plot details that are thrust upon his character. I really liked Sherry Cola, though, as a colleague of Sam’s, but Cola is reduced to reciting lines that seem made up on the spot. Cola is very gifted at improvisation, but the humor she dishes out here doesn’t serve the mechanics of Bride Hard‘s plot in the most suitable way.
Dorff’s mercenaries are looking for gold in a mansion-type home where characters’ rings and facial recognition technology are necessary to get through security measures that are in place. Though the motives of Kurt are dumb, the actor, Dorff, looks like he’s having fun. There aren’t a lot of menacing qualities in him from a visual standpoint, but Dorff knows how to chew into a role and that he does here, having a blast on-screen in a movie with an otherwise flat screenplay.
Wilson is always cracking zany one-liners as Sam is looking down on the characters she is out to overthrow for the greater good. She makes fun of them when necessary and Wilson is clearly enjoying her leading role here. Camp isn’t as funny as Wilson is, but Betsy is still believable as Sam’s best friend. Chlumsky is purposefully annoying in her role and that suits the script more than it will suit viewers’ patience while watching this film.
Bride Hard doesn’t want to win any Oscars. That much is clear. Bridesmaids was a great film and if this new picture wanted to combine that movie’s themes with those of Die Hard, there needed to be more of a specific edge to the film. While you’ll never feel Sam is truly in danger, the movie does kill off and or/injure a couple of characters to try to keep viewers in suspense. True, Betsy’s soon-to-be husband gets shot in the leg, but the big problem here is that it’s not at all funny. If there were more comic edge to the action, it would have worked in a way that something like 1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank did. As it plays now, the new movie goes back and forth uneasily between action and comedy instead of fluidly maintaining the combination throughout.
Randolph could have done the role she plays here in her sleep. Her presence in Bride Hard is the big problem with movies today. They often under-utilize the great talents that they employ in the films. I’m not going to say I hated Bride Hard, because I didn’t. I just expected more from such a well-assembled team. This film seems to have fizzled at the box-office and may be heading to streaming by the time you read this. That’s where it should have gone first to begin with.
Rating: 5/10
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