Bachelorette (2012)

Since I was quite busy watching movies last week, I have a line-up of reviews to write and post for the entire week. Today, my fingers are itching to continue with a movie going for the Best Picture, but I decided that I’ll write it for tomorrow and therefore I can be super critical this Monday morning – starting the week with the lowest rating since my new rating system seems rather harsh but the corncob was made for a reason. And yes, Bachelorette, the comedy that tried to achieve The Hangover and Bridesmaids, fails to impress me on all the levels.

The problem that I have with Bachelorette is best described in my two part post about the downfall of comedies I wrote last week, I’m just fed up with the humiliating comedies that are mistreating women as desperate and irresponsible. One thing is to portray them as hopeless romantics, which they have been doing for years anyway, but making them just plain stupid annoys me beyond everything else. So imagine my surprise when the premises of the Bachelorette is focusing on three women, one smart but still somehow irresponsible, one extremely stupid and then the third, who actually had so much more potential as a character than others, just broken, angry and stupid.

Regan (Kirsten Dunst), Katie (Isla Fisher) and Gena (Lizzy Caplan) are a part of Becky’s (Rebel Wilson) wedding that Regan seems to be managing. Firstly, they have a party the night before the wedding! I get the fact that the bride didn’t want to have a full on bachelorette-party anyway, but the groom went out the night before the wedding to a strip club so – this whole movie created a panic situation based on an illogical situation. That was the first thing that annoyed me, the fact that the entire plot was flawed from the start with the need to create some comedy-drama in a situation that would never actually happen in the real world. Everybody knows that the bride/groom should never party the night before the wedding and walk down the isle with a hangover!

As the movie progresses, the hate Regan, Katie and Gena seem to have against Becky seems to be inconsistent. Maybe it was only me, but in the beginning I felt as if all of them really didn’t like Becky, call it jealousy or what ever, but their friendship seemed very unlikely from the start because of their irrational behavior with drugs and the wedding dress. While Regan’s appeal that was slightly created in the beginning fell apart in the end, Gena become my favorite out of the bunch with her back story and softer demeanor even though her love interest Clyde (Adam Scott) could have come up with a better wedding speech. Which brings me to Regan’s sort of on screen lover Trevor (James Marsden) who in my mind didn’t really serve any purpose just to show that Regan wasn’t as well put together. For me, that was already proven by doing drugs and wrecking the dress, so there was no need to add bathroom sex into the mix. Or maybe they want to have a sequel and Regan’s pregnant on her wedding day with the doctor but Trevor ends up being the baby daddy.

Sequel thoughts aside, the biggest fault of the movie, if not all the previous ones weren’t not annoying enough, was the extremely naive Katie. Her stupidity was all over the place with the naive-act and then being depressed about the fact that she was so stupid – in my mind, stupid people don’t even think about their stupidity, they just are! Plus, she had some smart jokes in the movie that contradicted her character’s intelligence – therefore, Katie was all over the place not just as a girl on drugs but as a character as well. The biggest question mark is also strongly related to Katie because despite her being brainless, she was still liked by a man called Joe (Kyle Bornheimer) and even though it’s totally realistic that guys go for the naive beyond naive ones, Joe was way too nice to be that type of a shallow man.

So call it what it is, my own dislike towards the genre or my extremely bad mood during that day, I just couldn’t enjoy Bachelorette and I didn’t find it funny. And the situations aren’t all to blame, I’m pretty sure all of those things would have been funny in a different kind of setting. Plus, I would have done it without the drugs and just a bit of alcohol, the whole cocaine plot was also a bit disturbing and concerning, not to mention Katie’s overdose that was treated way too loosely. For that, my lowest rating and the fact that I like Dunst couldn’t even save the day, makes Bachelorette the worst of 2012 for me so far.