Bachelorette | Movie review

Lizzy Caplan, Isla Fisher and Kirsten Dunst, from left, in Bachelorette

It probably wasn’t the point writer-director Leslye Headland set out to prove, but her gutter-mouthed debut confirms that watching movies about people snorting coke is no more fun than hanging around the snorters in real life. Although it’s based on the filmmaker’s stage play, Bachelorette feels like it was cooked up in a studio brainstorming session: What if Bridesmaids met Superbad? Turns out you’d have a slack, desperate movie whose constant attempts at transgression grow tiresome long before they hit real shock.

As party-girl friends unexpectedly asked to partake in the wedding of a girl they tormented in high school, Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher and Lizzy Caplan tear into Headland’s dialogue like gate-crashers raiding the buffet, but it’s hard to make a meal out of lines like “Are you ready to Betsy Ross the shit out of this dress?” As the woman the trio once called “Pig Face”—which would have been the title of a nervier piece—Rebel Wilson almost walks off with the film, in part because her blithe crassness is preferable to the others’ studied vulgarity. Doubtless some will try to spin Bachelorette as a feminist rebuke to prettied-up notions of femininity—long hair gets in these characters’ way only when they’re trying to vomit up their sixth drinks—but the movie is too feeble-minded to score any but the easiest points.