June 20, 2025
by Carla Hay

Directed by Simon West
Culture Representation: Taking place in Savannah, Georgia, and briefly in Paris, the action/comedy film “Bride Hard” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans, Latin people and Asians) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A woman who is an undercover spy gets her secret work life exposed when a criminal and his gang of mercenaries invade her best friend’s wedding.
Culture Audience: “Bride Hard” will appeal primarily to fans of the movie’s headliners and mindless comedies that have broad slapstick and weak jokes.

The misguided action comedy “Bride Hard” is a tiresome mixture of silly and boring. This tacky story about a spy’s hijinks during her best friend’s wedding is like being forced to watch annoying people do terrible drunk karaoke at a wedding. The well-known cast members look like they know they’re in an embarrassing mess but they didn’t want to pass up whatever salary they were paid to be in one of the worst movies of their careers.
Directed by Simon West and written by Shaina Steinberg, “Bride Hard” (whose title is inspired by the 1988 action film “Die Hard”) is built on a very flimsy concept: An undercover spy, who’s in a bridal party for her best friend’s wedding, battles against a criminal gang that invades the wedding and has to teach the bride and bridesmaids some combat skills along the way. With a good screenplay, competent direction and skillful performances, this concept might have been passable entertainment.
Instead, “Bride Hard” is just blunder after blunder of cringeworthy jokes, sloppily staged action and substandard acting that are all more likely to have viewers rolling their eyes with exasperation rather than roaring with laughter. “Bride Hard” also pretends to have a “female empowerment” message, but spends most of the film depicting women as dimwitted, shallow and vindictive against each other. The movie runs into the run ground early and often its very outdated “joke” about women being more inept than men in handling weapons.
“Bride Hard” begins by showing the two female best friends at the center of the story—Sam and Betsy—30 years ago when they were about 11 years old and had to say goodbye each other as Sam moves away from their hometown of Savannah, Georgia. (“Bride Hard” was filmed on location in Savannah.) It’s mentioned later in the movie that Sam’s mother has been married at least six times and raised Sam in a working-class household. By contrast, Betsy comes from an upper-middle-class and stable family.
As adults, sarcastic Sam (played by Rebel Wilson) and perky Betsy (played by Anna Camp) are still best friends, but Betsy doesn’t know at the time that Sam is a secret spy for the U.S. government. (Sam has an Australian accent, which is Wilson’s real accent.) Sam’s fake job that she uses as a cover is being an artist who designs and sells cat prints. Sam is supposed to be the maid of honor at Betsy’s upcoming wedding.
They’re having the bachelorette party in Paris to accommodate Sam, who says that she has to work in Paris. Also attending the bachelorette party (which is being held at a pub that has male exotic dancers as entertainment) are the bridesmaids: Lydia (played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a sassy bachelorette who’s looking for love; Zoe (played by Gigi Zambado), a demanding and moody wife who’s very pregnant; and Virginia (played by Anna Chlumsky), Betsy’s snobby future sister-in-law, who’s jealous of the close friendship that Sam and Betsy have. (It’s the bridesmaid/maid of honor rivalry in “Bride Hard” is an obvious ripoff of a subplot in the 2011 classic comedy “Bridesmaids.”)
During this party (where rock star Yoshiki has a cameo role as himself), Sam gets an emergency alert from her spy colleague Nadine (played by Sherry Cola) that a terrorist named Magnus Paulson is about to obtain a bio-weapon that’s small enough to put in briefcase. Sam is under orders to not interfere but she abruptly leaves the party to race to where she knows Magnus is and thwarts the deal. A very ridiculous scene of chasing and fighting then ensues.
Sam is able to get the bio-weapon away from Magnus, but her insubordination gets her taken off of the case by her supervisor Edgar (played by Mark Valley), who doesn’t respect Sam because he thinks she’s too reckless and impulsive. When Sam goes back to the bachelorette party, she finds out that Betsy was so insulted by Sam leaving the party with no explanation, Betsy decided to make Virginia the maid of honor.
The wedding is being held on a private island in Savannah. Betsy’s fiancé Ryan Cauldwell (played by Sam Huntington) is a nice and humble man who comes from a wealthy family that has owned a successful liquor business for at least 200 years. Ryan is Virginia’s brother. The Cauldwell family’s company has one of its main distilleries not far from where the wedding will take place on a private island.
Betsy’s widower father Frank O’Connell (played by Michael O’Neill) is a decorated military veteran. Ryan’s parents Mark Cauldwell (played by Craig Anton) and Diane Cauldwell (played by Colleen Camp, no relation to Anna Camp) approve of Betsy, who is the type of person who wants everyone around her to be happy but she doesn’t tolerate flakiness. Colleen Camp, who is one of the producers of “Bride Hard,” has some of the worst lines of dialogue in the movie, which has an overabundance of stale jokes.
Sam is trying not to be bitter that her role in the wedding party was “demoted” from maid of honor to just being a regular bridesmaid. At a wedding rehearsal, Sam meets Chris (played by Justin Hartley), who is Ryan’s good-looking best man. Sam and Chris flirt with each other, which Virginia notices from a distance. Virginia later tells Sam to stay away from Chris because Virginia and Chris were romantically “linked” in the past. Virginia shows Sam a magazine article to prove it.
Chris is the subject of gossip because his father, who was Mark’s former business colleague, is in prison for fraud. At the rehearsal dinner, which is being held outdoors, the Betsy and the bridesmaids do a dance on the lawn, but Sam is excluded because the bridesmaids learned this dance at the Paris bachelorette party where Sam was mostly absent. Virginia makes a point of gloating abut Sam being excluded.
To get revenge on Virginia, Sam watches from a distance and uses a peashooter to hit Virginia with a rock. Virginia gets whacked in the head with the rock and falls into a bed of thorny flowers. To Virginia’s horror, several thorny flowers are stuck to her cleavage and have to be painfully removed, leaving bloody scratch marks on her upper chest. This is the type of “comedy” that’s in the movie.
Lydia shows a romantic interest in wedding officiator Reverend Tom (played by Kristian Kordula), who is an eligible bachelor. Zoe spends much of her screen time berating her husband Dave (played by Remy Ortiz) for not being attentive enough to her. And a comedy has a pregnant woman who’s almost ready to give birth , you can easily predict what will happen to the pregnancy during an inconvenient time.
At the wedding, things are going smoothly until right before the bride and groom say their vows. A gunslinging criminal named Kurt (played by Stephen Dorff) shows up with some of his thugs to invade the wedding. The gang hold everyone hostage because Kurt demands money from the Cauldwells and the release of some prisoners he knows.
The rest of “Bride Hard” is exactly what you think it will be: Sam has to figure out a way to be a hero who can rescue everyone, with help from the bridesmaids. None of it is funny or entertaining to watch. Expect to hear a lot of annoying shrieking because “Bride Hard” thinks it’s hilarious to see women in bridesmaid dresses being ditzy while pretending to be badasses. Wilson and Anna Camp co-starred in the first three “Pitch Perfect” movies, but “Bride Hard” has none of the charm of even the worst “Pitch Perfect” film.
One of the problems with “Bride Hard” is the uneven direction of the cast members’ performances. Dorff (who’s been typecast as a gruff villain for most of his career) acts like he’s in a serious movie. Cola looks like she wants to be in an intelligent independent film but is stuck in this the junky “Bride Hard.” And everyone else acts like “Bride Hard” is exactly what it is: a witless train wreck that’s not worth the effort to give good performances.
Magenta Light Studios released “Bride Hard” in U.S. cinemas on June 20, 2025.