Continuing my attempt to do more video reviews, partially inspired by Grace Randolph and others, here is my review of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, the second movie she wrote and directed. This one stars Jessie Buckley, fresh off her Oscar-nominated turn in Hamnet, as Ida, a mouthy woman in 1930s Chicago, who dies in a horrible accident involving mobsters. When Christian Bale’s Frankenstein (yes, the creation from Mary Shelley’s book) shows up at the office of Annette Bening’s Dr. Euphronius and asks her to create a mate for him, they dig up Ida’s body, bring it back to life, and she becomes…The Bride!
Anyway, you can watch my review to learn what I thought of the movie, but if you had seen the trailer as many times as I have and were hoping for something in the vein of Baz Luhrmann or Tim Burton, but it just falls flat, and it’s hard to figure out who to blame. (I forgot to mention in my review that it’s unfortunate for Christian Bale to do another film set in this era after David O. Russell’s unfortunate Amsterdam.)
You can watch my review above, but the long and short of it is that The Bride! is a movie that takes massive swings in combining a number of disparate film genres and ideas. It’s also a movie plagued by tonal issues and flagrant overacting that ruins any chance of an enjoyable experience.
Rating: 5.5/10
The Bride! opens on Friday, March 6, with previews on Thursday.
