movie review
THE BRIDE
ZERO STARS. Running time: 127 minutes. Rated R (strong/bloody violent content, sexual content/nudity and language). In theaters March 6.
Leave her at the altar!
She is “The Bride!,” one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job.
It’s a struck-by-lightning shocker to see a big Hollywood studio’s riff on a story as old and over-explored as “Frankenstein,” starring an Oscar winner and two nominees no less, be so slathered in ineptitude.
Yet, only seconds in, I regretted leaving my trusty torch and pitchfork at home.
“Knock, knock,” goes the first line in writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s confounding script, which was perhaps scribbled down at 4 a.m. in a dream journal. It’s spoken by Jessie Buckley, who’s up for Best Actress in 11 days.
“Who’s there?,” replies the same deranged woman, apparently talking to herself.
“It’s me, Mary Shelley, author of ‘Frankenstein’.”
A feeling of paralyzing dread crept in. There is another two hours and five minutes of this?!
Mary, who died in 1851, is trapped in a dark shadowy Limbo between the world and the afterlife. There, she rambles in sing-songy, literary gibberish with the overzealousness of a haunted house employee on payday.
To live on, Mary Mary Quite Unscary decides to spiritually possess a mobster’s girlfriend named Ida (also Buckley) in 1930s Chicago. Oh, it gets worse and worse.
After Ida has a foul-mouthed, supernatural outburst at a restaurant, a man pushes her down the stairs and kills her. For now, anyway.
Because then the famous horror creature (Christian Bale) arrives in the Windy City, still with gruesome stitches all over his face and neck even though he’s more than a century old. Bale, in another silly transformation, has the breathy voice of the Elephant Man, but pervier, like Joseph Merrick is ogling a stripper.
Chicago has the Cubs, Lake Michigan and its very own resident mad scientist named Dr. Euphronious, played by Annette Bening, who’s as stiff as the corpses her character dreams of reanimating. In Chi-Town, the hulk orders up some six-foot-deep dish.
“I’m looking for an intercourse,” the horny monster who goes by Frankenstein says to her.
“Is this about sex, Frank?,” she asks.
Yup. He longs to experience the whole “garden of pleasures” and enjoy a “relationship.”
Sold, the doc pumps high voltage electricity into Ida’s dead body and Frankenstein finally gets his coveted bride.
For some inexplicable reason, Mary continues to inhabit Ida and Buckley becomes Jekyll and Bride, switching erratically between an amped-up British accent and a Midwest flapper’s yap. The split-personality shtick makes zero sense and I couldn’t follow anything she said.
So far Gyllenhaal’s film has slumped in a fog of laugh-less confusion as it strains to be stylish while having no unique sense of style.
Its dirty-clown aesthetic is “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Its execution is “Joker: Folie à Deux.”
Now comes the time to exhume a feminist twist from the graveyard.
The film shifts into “Bonnie and Bride.” Whenever awful men wrong Bride, the duo brutally murder them.
Their ZzzzZzzzzZzzz crime spree begins outside a nightclub where a thug tries to rape her. Angry Frankenstein “curbs” him, meaning he puts the jerk’s head on the sidewalk and crushes his skull with his foot.
On the run, they flee the cops on a train to New York City, where Frank stalks a Fred Astaire-like Hollywood star named Ronnie Reed (Maggie’s brother Jake Gyllenhaal).
Because he’s fanatically obsessed with Ronnie’s black-and-white musical films, which all look fake, there is a pointless, sexualized company dance number to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” not so much nodding to Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankstein” as defiling it.
As their drawn-out, uninteresting antics go on and on, Frank and Bride are pursued by two cliched detectives — Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz). You won’t be surprised to learn that she’s the real brains behind the partnership, but Jakes gets all the credit.
The movie’s obvious message — “I’m not the Bride of anybody!” — is foghorn loud yet completely ineffective, a la “Kids, don’t go subway surfing.”
Bale and Buckley’s acting is committed, oh yes. To a fault. Never do you believe them in these poorly constructed roles or sympathize with their us-against-the-world plight.
Buckley especially needed to be reined in. She brought me back to her performance as Sally Bowles in London’s West End production of “Cabaret.” When she can’t think of anything else to do, she throws her head back and laughs maniacally.
Bale blends Batman and Gollum.
Gyllenhaal’s 2021 directorial debut “The Lost Daughter,” which starred Buckley and Olivia Colman, was fantastic and unsettling; a brilliant note to begin on.
After the repellent sludge that is “The Bride!,” she must bring her skill for simple, psychological storytelling back from the dead.
The end credits song here, I kid you not, is “Monster Mash.” The capper on this monster mush.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
