CINEMA: Bride Wars

In which the case of equality for women is thrown back at least 40 years, because if you were to believe this excruciatingly dated movie the only thing clever, ambitious women want to do is get married – right? Wrong!

The women in question are best friends Liv (Kate Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) who are now all grown up and in good jobs (Liv is a lawyer, Kate a teacher) with live-in boyfriends. They’ve both always dreamed about getting married at New York’s Plaza Hotel and so when their boyfriends propose they immediately make a dual appointment to see hot wedding planner in town Marion (Candice Bergen) in order to reserve their dates. But somehow, among all the talk of dresses, flowers and invitations, the bookings at the Plaza get mixed up and the girls suddenly find themselves getting married on the same day, at the same time, in the same hotel. The boys’ answer to this is to have a double wedding, however the thought of sharing their special day, albeit with their supposed best friend, sends the girls into a frenzy of tit for tat pettiness as they try to spoil each other’s weddings.

What were Hudson and Hathaway thinking signing up to a movie that would have looked retro in the 50s, let alone the noughties? Bride Wars is supposed to be a comedy, instead it’s an embarrassing farce, portraying women as mean-spirited harpies whose only mission in life is to get that ring on their fingers. On no account treat this as a good first date movie, because having seen two supposedly sane, intelligent women descend into Stepford Wife caricatures, any red-blooded man worth his salt will turn into a paranoid commitmentphobe.      Dee Pilgrim.