There were a couple reasons why Sarah and I decided to watch Bachelorette. We liked Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher. Lizzy Caplan was in it. We’d seen her in True Blood and in Party Down, and she was always funny. Secondly, we had had a stressful weekend and we needed some bawdy humor. This looked like it would provide that.
What we got was a bunch of people being terrible to themselves and each other. The movie centers around three women being assholes to another girl who is simultaneously heavier than them and getting married before they are, so they have a stripper call her a cruel nickname from high school at her bachelorette party and then ruin her wedding dress by trying to fit two of them in it to show how fat the other girl is. Then they spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out how to get it fixed and cleaned, which involves all of them doing drugs and further soiling the dress with all sorts of situations that are supposed to be shocking and funny (but aren’t).
I’m at least moderately certain the movie was supposed to be a comedy, but it wasn’t even what I’d call cringe humor. It was, instead, stress humor. The kind where you get stressed and don’t laugh. Ever. If I were to lay that aside and think of the movie instead as a drama, now I am faced with trying to empathize with four caricatures of some of what the creators considered the worst sides of being a single woman. They try to have each of the horrible people have a little epiphany and become less horrible, except that is not what happens at all. For instance: at one point, the promiscuous one with the drug problem says “I just sleep and do drugs with people who are nice to me because I don’t know how to do anything else”. Then right before the wedding, she gets her stomach pumped because she tried to kill herself with a bottle of xanax because a computer programmer wouldn’t sleep with her. Then she gets drunk at the wedding like two hours later. REDEMPTION ACHIEVED!
Only thing I enjoyed in the movie had very little to do with the actual plot: Lizzy Caplan’s character got back together with her ex-boyfriend played by Adam Scott (they were the love interests on Party Down, and it was nostalgic).
I cannot express to you how much I recommend you don’t see this movie. It will not make you feel anything but awful. It will undo any good feelings for Kirsten Dunst you ever had, and you will feel sorry for Sacha Baren Cohen for having to live with anyone associated with this movie. It made me sad for single people, for men, for women, for the institution of marriage, Luxembourg, and eventually for humanity itself.
If I could go back in time and prevent this movie, and it would cost me my life to do so, I’d still do it.