Bride Wars

BY COINCIDENCE, Anne Hathaway appears in two of this month's new movies, both charting complications during wedding preparations. She may well get an Oscar nomination for Rachel Getting Married, which opens in a fortnight, but there's no chance of any awards going to Bride Wars, which arrives today.

A prologue introduces Liv and Emma as children, best friends acting out weddings for their amusement. Flash forward, and their stereotypically represented professions serve as shorthand for their personalities as adults.

Liv (Kate Hudson) is a lawyer and therefore pushy and tough-as-nails. Emma (Hathaway) is a teacher and inevitably dedicated, caring and loyal. Both women become engaged around the same time and are eagerly looking forward to their weddings until an unlikely clerical error causes both functions to clash in the same hotel on the same day. The former best friends discover the truth of the adage that there's a thin line between love and hate, and they bring out the worst in each other when devising schemes to sabotage their rival nuptials.

Their fiances are reduced to peripheral figures with no lives outside of work, watching telly and going to the gym. Then again, Bride Warsis a movie calculatedly manufactured to attract the women who turned out in their millions to see The Devil Wears Prada, Sex and the Cityand Mamma Mia!.

"I really wanted to do a movie that was about women pushing the comedic envelope," says Kate Hudson, who doubled as producer on the film and enlisted three screenwriters for that task, but there's nothing remotely funny about the laboured scenario they delivered. Her own shrill performance doesn't help, and grates in comparison with the dignity Hathaway manages to muster.

Candice Bergen, who made her film debut in a far superior film about female friends, the 1966 adaptation of Mary McCarthy's The Group, has a thankless extended cameo as the wedding planner hired by both brides, although it has to be said that Bergen is looking younger than in years.

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Directed by Gary Winick. Starring Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Candice Bergen, Bryan Greenberg, Chris Pratt, Steve Howey PG cert, gen release, 88 min