Bride Hard dies hard

The trouble is, instead of contrasting Sam’s hyperconfident spycraft with her social inelegance or fake cat-lady alias, Wilson just plays both sides of Sam as, well, Rebel Wilson—deadpan, sarcastic, and prone to repeating random words under her breath in the hopes that one of them lands like a joke. While she handles the action scenes just fine, Wilson misses what could be a scene-stealing opportunity for a character actor leaning into dual personas. (Just imagine what someone like Jennifer Garner could have done with the role.)

Perhaps sensing that vacuum at the center of the film, the rest of the female ensemble goes broad to compensate. Anna Chlumsky does her best Rose Byrne as the Type-A future sister-in-law threatening to steal Betsy’s friendship away from Sam. Gigi Zumbado is a pregnant bridesmaid who doesn’t really get a defining characteristic beyond that. Camp at least attempts to give Betsy a loopy sense of comedic specificity that isn’t really on the page. And Da’Vine Joy Randolph scores the movie’s most genuine laughs in the sort of confident, man-eating role that used to be Wilson’s bread and butter in movies like How To Be Single. (A much better female ensemble comedy than this one.)

For a while, Bride Hard vaguely plays around with the bridal party’s interpersonal dynamics and the growing tension between Sam and Betsy until the story takes a sharp left turn in act two. Just as Betsy walks down the aisle on her future in-laws’ private island estate, Stephen Dorff storms the beach with a crew of armed mercenaries to take all the guests hostage and demand access to a secret vault. Because Sam is around the corner when the takeover happens, she’s left, Die Hard-style, to take out the bad guys, save the hostages, and maybe fix her fractured friendship with Betsy along the way. 

To West’s credit, he does deliver a couple fun action sequences that take advantage of the specifics of the wedding setting. Where John McClane had C-4 and a machine gun at Nakatomi Plaza, Sam has champagne bottles, curling irons, and chocolate fountains at her disposal. Though the filmmaker behind Con Air and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider doesn’t deliver his best action work here, there’s B-movie fun to be had watching Wilson run around in a bright red dress and sky-high ponytail, taking down muscled bad guys in increasingly unlikely ways. The film even pushes its R-rating with a few genuinely brutal kills—including a particularly gnarly use of a cupcake stand. 

The trouble is, instead of quitting while it’s ahead, the movie just keeps going and going and going. Though Bride Hard is only 105 minutes long, its repetitive pacing makes it feel about twice that. Instead of building in intensity, the action scenes get less interesting as they go along—culminating in a final chase sequence that’s a mess of low-budget green screen. And there’s a pretty baffling role for This Is Us star Justin Hartley as a handsome wedding guest who may be more than he seems, a fact that contributes to one of about five different endings before the credits finally, mercifully roll. 

If you squint, you can see the movie Bride Hard might have been. One that rounds out the character work, finds punchlines for the jokes, and takes better advantage of the chemistry between former Pitch Perfect co-stars Camp and Wilson, who do at least seem to be having fun whenever they’re onscreen together. Instead, Bride Hard rests on the laurels of its knock-off premise and its familiar female friendship platitudes. The mash-up idea may have seemed like a match made in heaven, but the execution just feels like something borrowed. 

Director: Simon West
Writer: Shaina Steinberg
Starring: Anna Camp, Anna Chlumsky, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Gigi Zumbado, Stephen Dorff, Justin Hartley
Release Date: June 20, 2025