ANDY FICKMAN

Bil’s rating (out of 5):  BBB. 

USA, 2010.  Touchstone Pictures, Frontier Pictures.  Screenplay by Moe Jelline.  Cinematography by David Hennings.  Produced by Andy Fickman, John J. Strauss, Eric Tannenbaum.  Music by Nathan Wing.  Production Design by Craig Stearns.  Costume Design by Genevieve Tyrrell.  Film Editing by Keith Brachmann, David Rennie.  

As a teenager, Kristen Bell was awkward and geeky, plagued by acne and hidden behind giant glasses, and naturally the instant target of the popular mean girls on the cheerleading team. Now a successful PR executive, Bell is happy to be taking a break from work to go home for her brother’s wedding but is thrown into disarray when the bride-to-be (Odette Annable) is the former leader of the high school torture squad who made her life a living hell. The plot gets even richer when her sympathetic mother (Jamie Lee Curtis) finds out that Annable’s guardian and aunt (Sigourney Weaver) is her own former high school rival. Everyone wants to rise above the pettiness but it is impossible to do; instead, wedding plans are made while mud is flung, the women try to focus on the happiness of the occasion but Bell finds it difficult to hold back when it becomes important to her to really get revenge.  The ending is a cheap fantasy that belittles what was until then some wonderfully mean fun, but this is a highly enjoyable comedy whose cast makes up for some highly improbable plot holes (I don’t believe anyone would be unacquainted with their brother’s fiancée until the week of the wedding, I don’t care how busy they are in their careers). It also includes a couple of scenes with the perpetually feisty Betty White, though her talents are wasted here when compared to her performance in the superior The Proposal a year before.