It is being called the Hangover With Women but that is really selling Bridesmaids short. There is a lot more going on here than just laughs and while it is definitely an R rated comedy, it doesn’t rely solely on the extreme for them.

Annie (Kristen Wiig) is terminally unsuccessful. Following a failed baking business and a nasty break up she has found herself in a job she hates, an apartment with weird roommates she can’t stand and a pseudo relationship with a man who is only interested in sex and nothing else (Jon Hamm). When her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) asks her to be her maid of honor in her upcoming wedding, everything gets that much worse. Suddenly Annie finds herself at odds with Lillian’s new friend Helen (Rose Byrne) who is the wife of Lillian’s fiance’s boss and is successful in every way that Annie is not. What results is a hilarious and heartbreaking as Annie’s every attempt to one up Helen fails just as her attempts at romance with police officer Nathan Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd) are undone by her own insecurity.

Written by Wiig and directed by the great Paul Feig in his feature debut, Bridesmaids is more than just funny jokes and clever set ups. Annie is very easy to relate to and the movie gets a bit dark in the final act as she becomes more and more distressed which leads to more and more failure. If you are a person who has ever felt that no matter what you do you can just never measure up then you will find a lot to relate to here.

Of course the movie is a comedy and I don’t want to paint it out to be a drama. It is definitely funny and gets funnier as it goes along. While there are some poop jokes this is not really a gross out comedy so much as a comedy of errors in which occasional gross things happen. It also isn’t overblown or outside the realm of possibility. With comedies like the Hangover you are suspending some disbelief to accept a lot of the things that go on. Here that is not the case as the comedy is grounded in reality and finds its laughs in the relatability of the characters.

The characters themselves are well drawn and you feel like you really know them by the end. Likewise no one is goofy just to be goofy and you get a strong sense that these characters have lives and well drawn motivations for who they are and why they do the things they do. This deepens the relationship the audience has with them and allows the jokes to hit their mark that much more effectively.

It is not all peaches and cream though. Bridesmaids takes its time getting going and some of the material in the first act feels rushed and unfinished. There are many moments that feel like they are less cohesive scenes and more individual skits waiting for a punchline connected with the thinnest of narrative glue. Luckily the film finds its footing a third of the way in and flows much more smoothly. The laughs at this point don’t feel choppy and feel much more organic and much less forced.

The performances are uniformly good and I think a lot of people who are usually annoyed with Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live will be surprised at what they see here. She isn’t doing schtick of any kind and her performance is very convincing and feels very genuine. Given she is a co-writer on the project it is hard not to assume that this is material she is very familiar with. Maya Rudolph plays it more or less straight her as she is not given a lot of really funny material but she knocks what she has out of the park. Rose Byrne is the piece’s villain and she delivers Helen with unexpected depth. It is nice to see a character like this played with more than one dimension. Melissa McCarthy’s Megan is a real treat as a character that could have gone off the rails but she gives her just the right amount of audacity and strangeness to be completely effective. It was also great to see Chris O’Dowd here. He was great on the IT Crowd and awesome in Dinner for Schmucks but it was very nice to see him get a pretty meaty role here.

Conclusion [9.0 out of 10]

It is annoying to see Bridesmaids sold short by calling it a girl version of male driven raunchy comedies. There is a lot more going on here and the film stands on its own. This is also not a girls only movie and it is very accessible to both genders. This is going to go down as one of the best comedies of the year and will easily stand the test of time for years to come.