The Bride!
- Mar 21
- 5 min read
A complete cinematic train wreck, THE BRIDE! is an unwatchable, boring, moronic, self-important mess that starts badly and goes downhill from there.
It's a good thing Jessie Buckley won an Oscar last weekend for "Hamnet", because she's horrible here, overacting so badly she makes Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" look monstrously reserved.
To be fair to Buckley, Director Maggie Gyllenhaal is responsible for this mess. There is "swinging for the fences" and then there's this, an $80 million student film that just wants to vomit it's "so important" take on you until you submit. The film has no style beyond appearing very expensive and trying to be as LOUD as possible, always.
What a mess.
The film opens with author Mary Shelley (Buckley again, sporting an annoyingly garish, gruff voice that sounds like she's smoked eight packs a day for 100 years) setting up our story. This isn't going to be about ANY MAN, it's going to be about THE BRIDE! MEN are stupid and oppressive and WOMEN are not being heard!
That certainly had merit when Shelley broke the rules and boundaries in publishing 'Frankenstein" at the age of 19 in 1816.
Gyllenhaal has been vocal that women, from her view, haven't made much advancement in the 210 years since and she's created her impossibly brilliant & important opus to testify to that fact.
Unfortunately, she's forgotten to create any characters or people we actually care about to convey her oh-so-very-important take, which she beats us over the head with every five minutes.
Shelley immediately possesses the body of Ida, a mobster's girl in 1930's Chicago. In the first sign of just how bad Buckley has over-committed, she leaps to the tabletop, grinding away on mobsters in a fine dining restaurant, slurping oysters and breaking into long winded rants in Shelley's sandpaper voice as patrons look on and mobsters get pissed.
Ida gets thrown down some stairs and killed by the mobsters in question.
Meanwhile, Frank wonders into Chicago looking like the comic strip hero The Shadow, scarf across his face and hat in place.
It's Christian Bale, a surprisingly urbanite version of Frankenstein's monster whose worst attribute seems to be the odor of rotting flesh he carries with him like Axe body spray.
He's on a quest to meet Dr. Euphronious, played by Annette Bening (Bugsy, Love Affair). She's a cutting edge doctor exploring "revitalization" in animals, which sounds a lot like his Daddy's experiments to Frank.
Before you can crank up the electricity and shout "She's Alive!" the doc and Frank dig up Ida and wake her up, the black ooze that they pumped into her corpse splashing across her face like a lurid tattoo.
Frank takes a break just after the procedure to go to a Chicago movie house and watch a film with his favorite song and dance man, Ronnie Reed. Reed sings and dances his black & white way through a series of big numbers that Frank imagines himself in. As the film goes on, Frank will return to Reed's movies again and again (and again...) and we see his visions of he and Ida, oops, I mean The Bride! in these song and dance numbers. It's a bizarre allusion to another massive film flop, 1981's "Pennies from Heaven" starring Steve Martin. There were at least three scenes in that visually stunning film that carry more heart than the entire, exhausting 126 minutes of this turd.
Ronnie Reed is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who I can only imagine owed his sister a huge favor. Consider that debt paid in full, Jake. He's fine in the part and is the only actor who escapes unscathed from this celluloid manure heap.
Frank and The Bride! (NEVER forget the exclamation point!!!!!) head off on a Bonnie and Clyde style crime spree from Chicago to New York, killing a bunch of dudes from street thugs to pervy cops. Gyllenhaal (Maggie, not Jake) must have been deeply inspired by Arthur Penn's 1967 classic because in that film, Clyde (Warren Beatty) was impotent, a condition shared by Frank until the murders fire him up.
There is a scene on a train with Frank and The Bride! hiding on a train, on the lam. Ida is suddenly possessed again by Shelley and she starts singing "Falling In Love Again" at the top of her lungs. Her singing voice sounds like a blend of Bea Arthur in "Mame" and Al Pacino. I'm not sure what emotion writer/director Gyllenhaal was going for in that sequence, but like the rest of the film, it splats flatly on screen with a dull thud, simply serving as a bridge between one dull scene to the next.
The entire film has virtually zero flow.
At one point after the murder spree has started, we are introduced to two detectives, Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz). I thought, ok, maybe these are characters to drive the story. That lasted about two minutes. Poor Sarsgaard and Cruz, two great actors, are stranded playing one note characters that serve one purpose: Look! Wiles is lazy and knows nothing, yet he has the detective badge! Myrna is the woman really doing all the work with all the brains! MAN: BAD, WOMAN: GOOD!!! (this mess NEVER forgets its exclamation points!!!!!!)
Just when I thought is couldn't get any worse, it actually manages to stage a song and dance number with Frank, The Bride and Ronnie Reed and the song is....."Young Frankenstein" fans get ready..... "Puttin' On The Ritz".
It's staged with so little humor, style or sense of place that it just splats on the screen. At this point, it just became a test of patience to make it through this dreck.
I have to give credit to the production design by Karen Murphy, (Elvis, A Star is Born) the entire film LOOKS great. The costumes by Sandy Powell (Gangs of New York, The Departed) are also excellent. Murphy and Powell create a real sense of time and place. Too bad Gyllenhaal populates them with such heavy handed crap.
Bale does what he can, acting just as surprised at some of Buckley's antics as we are. Watch for this one to disappear quickly off every actor's highlight reel.
There were moments during the film that I thought it most closely resembled 2024's "Joker" Folie a Deux" a film that I actually liked a lot. I was in the decided minority on that one, audiences hated it. I remember walking out of a packed preview as audiences voiced how much they hated the film.
The end of THE BRIDE! was far different. The two other people in the theater just walked out in stunned silence, as baffled as I was by the complete waste of time and vision we just suffered through.
Save yourself 126 minutes and leave THE BRIDE! at the altar. It's one of the worst films I've ever seen, splatting to the basement with an F.
Comments