Where do I start?

Over 90% in positive reviews according to Rotten Tomatoes, written by those responsible for the hilarious Saturday Night Live skits and brought to the screen by those that gave us Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin. Mix these together and you get a pretty high expectation level for Bridesmaids. Some had even called it the comedy of the year, a possible “Hangover”-esque comedy with women in power.

I don’t want to sound anti-feminist but Bridesmaids fails miserably.

Annie (Kristen Wiig) and Liliane (Maya Rudolph) have been best friends since they were little girls. When Liliane gets engaged, she chooses Annie to be her maid of honor. And then they meet the other bridesmaids: a neurotic woman named Helen (Rose Byrn), a newlywed Becca (Ellie Kemper), a tomboy-ish Megan (Melissa McCarthy) and a frustrated mother and wife named Rita (Wendy McLendon-Covey).

Naturally, the bridesmaids won’t get along well as conflict between Helen, who wants to be Liliane’s best friend, and Annie soon arises. And this is the movie’s catalyst (or lack thereof): how the characters interact.

Starting off with a sex scene and going into the monotonous life of a woman and her best friend, the movie sets itself as a chick-flick from the get-go. And it doesn’t really try to stray from that connotation until about the 45th minute. And that’s a lot of baggage for a movie to try to get rid off with one scene that involves a dress fitting gone seriously wrong after some Brazilian food poisoning.

Yes, you will laugh your ass off at that scene and start hoping that the movie has picked up but you will be severely disappointed.

And what do you know, single Annie soon enough meets her own prince charming in the form of a police officer who pulls her over because he thought she was driving under the influence of alcohol. Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd) soon embarks on a troubled relationship with Annie that doesn’t really unfold and is left as a side story more in the realms of cliche than of a true relationship.

Bridesmaids is a terribly slow movie as well. The plot lingers on so many irrelevant points that it doesn’t feel like moving at all. And mind you, I had no idea this was a two hour movie. It’s almost longer than Harry Potter. No comedy is supposed to take this long to unfold, especially one with so little jokes and so many useless dialogue.

The acting in Bridesmaids is pretentious as well. Not only is it agonizing to watch at times, but it’s also as rickety as the joints of a creaky table. Some have called Kristen Wiig’s performance a breakthrough. Excuse me, but have we watched the same movie? She’s not even the character that delivers the good jokes in the movie, it’s tomboy-ish Megan. And Helen, the movie’s “villain” is so marinated in everything cliche about the perfectionist wedding planner than seeing her on screen initiates your gag reflex.

Let me put it this way, Bridesmaids was so bad that a friend who watched the movie with me and who hates anything in the fantasy genre wished she had watched Harry Potter instead. And I was mortified that I had actually suggested we’d watch such a movie. I’m pretty sure a third screening of Harry would have been much more enjoyable than seeing a bunch of women make a joke of themselves by vomiting, cracking jokes about blowjobs, diarrhea and getting wasted on airplanes.

Let me try to grade this. 3/10