Now Playing
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

sort by name

sort by score

53 Australia
33 Bedtime Stories
41 Beverly Hills Chihuahua
57 Body of Lies
68 Bolt
24 Bride Wars
63 Burn After Reading
65 Cadillac Records
58 City of Ember
70 Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The
82 Dark Knight, The
40 Day the Earth Stood Still, The
27 Delgo
70 Doubt
43 Eagle Eye
36 Fly Me to the Moon
41 Four Christmases
72 Gran Torino
28 Haunting of Molly Hartley. The
57 High School Musical 3: Senior Year
51 Hotel for Dogs
35 How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
47 Inkheart
57 Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D
61 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
53 Marley & Me
84 Milk
35 Mirrors
51 My Bloody Valentine 3-D
39 Nights in Rodanthe
50 Nothing Like the Holidays
61 Notorious
40 Outlander
39 Paul Blart: Mall Cop
45 Pride and Glory
30 Punisher: War Zone
58 Quantum of Solace
69 Revolutionary Road
36 Righteous Kill
60 Role Models
19 Saw V
57 Secret Life of Bees, The
36 Seven Pounds
49 Sex Drive
49 Soul Men
30 Spirit, The
53 Tale of Despereaux, The
51 Transporter 3
56 Twilight
30 Unborn, The
xx Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
56 Valkyrie
70 Vicky Cristina Barcelona
56 W.
93 WALL-E
46 Yes Man
56 Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

sort by name

sort by score

58 Adam Resurrected
64 Appaloosa
69 Ashes of Time Redux
68 August Evening
54 Battle in Seattle
75 Betrayal - Nerakhoon, The
70 Black Balloon, The
55 Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The
51 Breakfast with Scot
xx Cargo 200
44 Chandni Chowk to China
63 Changeling
64 Che
56 Cherry Blossoms
84 Christmas Tale, A
93 Class, The
38 Dark Streets
58 Defiance
43 Donkey Punch
xx Dostana
62 Duchess, The
46 Dukes, The
63 Eden
xx Extreme Movie
69 Fear(s) of the Dark
26 Filth and Wisdom
28 Fireproof
80 Frost/Nixon
43 Gardens of the Night
73 Girl Cut in Two, A
39 Good
54 Good Dick
30 Guitar, The
84 Happy-Go-Lucky
31 Hounddog
21 House of the Sleeping Beauties
50 How About You
70 Hunger
72 I Served the King of England
70 I.O.U.S. A
40 Igor
79 I've Loved You So Long
64 JCVD
65 Just Another Love Story
xx Killshot
29 Lake City
57 Last Chance Harvey
82 Let the Right One In
31 Let Them Chirp Awhile
xx Local Color
17 Lodger, The
89 Man on Wire
70 Moscow, Belgium
36 My Name Is Bruce
28 Nobel Son
43 Not Easily Broken
64 Nothing But the Truth
79 Of Time and the City
40 Other End of the Line, The
34 Otto; or Up with Dead People
75 Pool, The
78 Pray the Devil Back to Hell
xx Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
82 Rachel Getting Married
58 Reader, The
56 Religulous
32 Repo! The Genetic Opera
53 RocknRolla
65 Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
82 Secret of the Grain, The
81 Silent Light
86 Slumdog Millionaire
57 Special
82 Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
67 Synecdoche, New York
82 Tell No One
68 Theater of War
68 Timecrimes
83 Trouble the Water
43 Tru Loved
83 U2 3D
90 Waltz with Bashir
59 We Are Wizards
81 Wendy and Lucy
71 What Doesn't Kill You
55 What Just Happened?
61 Where God Left His Shoes
40 While She Was Out
81 Wrestler, The
48 Yonkers Joe

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Bride Wars
20th Century Fox


3.2

based on 30 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 27 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: PG for suggestive content, language and some rude behavior

Starring Anne Hathaway, Kate Hudson, Candice Bergen, Kristen Johnston, Bryan Greenberg, Steve Howey, Chris Pratt, and Michael Arden

Liv and Emma are best friends who since childhood have planned every detail of their respective weddings. At the top of their bridal "must have" list: a ceremony at New York's ultimate bridal destination, the Plaza Hotel. Now, at age 26, they're both about to get married; they're about to realize their dreams; and they're about to live happily ever after. Or maybe not--when a clerical error causes a clash in wedding dates - they're now to be married on the same date! - Liv, Emma and their lifelong friendship are put to the ultimate test. Now, the two best friends who'd do anything for each other, find themselves in a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners struggle that threatens to erupt into all-out war. (20th Century Fox)

GENRE(S):	Comedy \| Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Greg Depaul Casey Wilason June Raphael
DIRECTED BY:	Gary Winick
RELEASE DATE:	Theatrical: January 9, 2009
RUNNING TIME:	minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Premiere Olivia Putnal

Sometimes the only funny stuff is in the trailers, but not so here. Kristen Johnson was especially adept at stealing some scenes.

Film Threat Stina Chyn

A chick flick in the purest sense--it's not about men or falling in love--and is quite funny.

San Francisco Chronicle Reyhan Harmanci

If you came to see two pretty girls in wedding dresses wrestle, you won't be disappointed.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Bride Wars is pretty thin soup. The characters have no depth or personality, no quirks or complications, no conversation.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Bride Wars pretends to be a satire of wedding mania, but since there's virtually nothing else to the movie, the satire comes depressingly close to endorsement.

LA Weekly Robert Wilonsky

A step backward for Hathaway, Bride Wars is one more step into the quicksand for Hudson, who's spent the nine years since ""Almost Famous wandering the rom-com wasteland in search of an exit strategy; this movie, which she exec produced, ain't it.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

A dopey if largely painless romantic comedy.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

A chick flick that makes its chick characters - and by extension its chick audience - look like hateful, backward toddlers, and there is something wrong with that.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Bride Wars really does not capture the mood of the moment. It comes from a different time, a different planet.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Like moussed hair and inverted-pyramid shoulder pads, this sloppy, sloppy slapstick is an artifact from the 1980s.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

It represents a missed opportunity on every level. As a black comedy, it fails. As a satire of the bloated wedding industry, it fails. As a drama about friendship triumphing over all, it fails.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

With artifice as layered as the tiers of a marzipan cake, this resembles nothing so much as a stale Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedy.

Variety Todd McCarthy

A shrill, mechanical comedy.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

No cues are needed to understand the plot, which feels computer-generated and barely serves to sustain an hour and a half running time.

Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

The idea of a revenge comedy isn't necessarily a bad one, Bride Wars simply fails at it despite having the formidable duo of Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, who in their own distinctive ways usually command the screen.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Bride Wars is about as funny as a cringingly awkward wedding toast.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

An insipid comedy in which the women are shallow, acquisitive, backstabbing, selfish harridans.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Exceedingly lame.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

A girlie romantic comedy with tired slapstick pranks but not an ounce of self-respect or intelligence.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Bride Wars has possibly the worst comedy idea since "Springtime for Hitler," with almost no room for redeeming camp.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

The movie pretty much blows.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

By comparison, Bride Wars makes "Sex and the City" seem like Jane Austen.

TV Guide Perry Seibert

All in all, that's not a bad premise for a lightweight chick flick, but director Gary Winick and an army of three screenwriters can't come up with a single fresh comedic idea.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Never gets off its high-concept stool long enough to explore what makes weddings so exciting and nerve-racking and treacherous. It flounders instead in juvenilia and bitchiness.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Predictable, lazy and as overprocessed as Kate Hudson's hair, this thoroughly joyless movie also possesses a deep nasty streak, making it loathsome when it might have been merely annoying.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

It's both slack and bloated; I've been to Catholic wedding masses that had more zip. I think it clocked in at fewer than 90 minutes, but it seemed to last longer than most marriages do.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Hudson has, if nothing else, traded up: last winter she was stuck in "Fool's Gold."

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

There may be a trenchant satire to be mined from our culture's materialism-warped wedding madness, but Bride Wars instead opts for graceless, flailing, poorly choreographed slapstick performed by characters who suggest a dumbed-down tour production of "Sex And The City."

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

I'd be hard-pressed to name another recent film so deeply noxious, soul-sick, and unfunny.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The first big-studio movie released in 2009 has a damn fine chance of being the worst. Bride Wars isn't just chick-flick hell for guys, it should numb the skulls of moviegoers of all sexes and ages.

The average user rating for this movie is 3.2 (out of 10) based on 27 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Chad S. gave it a1:
With a friend like Liv(Kate Hudson), who needs enemies? With a friend like Emma(Anne Hathaway), who needs enemies? Therein lies the fundamental problem of "Bride Wars". Since this idiom applies to both women, the audience has no rooting interest. In a galaxy far, far away, women act irrationally towards each other to such an absurd degree, it's equally irrational, equally absurd that they should kiss and make up, without even the stopgap measure of a truce before the ironclad reconciliation. That galaxy is the prefabricated world of "Bride Wars", where weddings are a rite of passage for women with late-blooming arrested development, and short, very short memories. Women like Emma and Liz don't exist; they're not recognizably human(blue hair is not something any woman would forget, not even temporarily), therefore, not the least bit funny(utilizing a blouse as some turban to hide the blue hair is not a choice any sensible woman would make). "Bride Wars" plays like a chick flick with the DNA of a black comedy. The moment Emma decides against moving her wedding date for the more successful friend(Liv is a lawyer), "Bride Wars" circuitously references "Beaches" with the schoolteacher's refusal to be the wind beneath the other bride's wings, and beaches "Beaches" by being the anti-"Beaches", with its feel-bad hijinks. The audience should be on Emma's side, but she loses them, with this ugly putdown: "Your wedding will be big, like your ass on prom night." In a mainstream comedy, it's probably a mistake that Emma should be this unsympathetic; the antithesis of the middle school teacher in Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's novel "Ms. Hempel Chronicles". When both women were adolescents, Liv probably started off as the smart one, while Emma was the pretty one; then Liz lost weight and the agency of their friendship switched hands. In the opening scene, the two girls play bride and groom, and Emma is the groom, the man in the relationship. Emma fattens Liv up with treats to reverse time, so the lawyer can be her fat wife again, and regain that long-lost agency in their adult selves. After all, this insulting, misogynistic film depicts both women as children, anyway.

Ed D gave it a9:
These reviews are far too harsh! I found the movie legitimately funny (Kristen Johnston was particularly hysterical) and definitely worth seeing. I left the theatre with a smile on my face.

[Anonymous] gave it a0:
The worst movie of 2009, so far. And I have a feeling, due to how bad this film is, that that title may stick for all the remaining months to come.

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page

Bride Wars 20th Century Fox

Bride Wars
20th Century Fox