27 Dresses
In 27
Dresses, Katherine Heigl makes the leap from promising talent to bona
fide film star.
This
promotion is not so much because she is out there breaking boundaries and
doing great, classic films. In this case it is more elemental.
Here Heigl joins that rarified rank of actors who can take a
sweet-but-slight, predictable, occasionally clichéd film and through sheer
force of will and personality make it seem to be a much better movie than it
actually is.
This star
quality is hard to come by and Heigl has it to burn.
Therefore,
this formulaic chick-com about a wedding-obsessed always-a-bridesmaid
personal assistant who is invited to everyone's wedding but her own — goes
down a lot easier than it should.
Heigl plays
Jane, the extremely competent and shy assistant at a politically correct
eco-friendly big business. She is quietly in love with her boss
(played with oily charm by Ed Burns), but she is so quiet that he doesn't
even realize that she is interested — in fact, he barely recognizes that
she has a life outside of work at all.
Jane also
has a spoiled-model sister (Malin Akerman) who captures the attention of the
boss. Despite the fact that Jane is madly in love with the guy, she
just rolls over, assuming that he could never fall for her. In fact,
no one really seems to fall for her, ever.
This is a
little hard to buy into, because no one in the world is likely to miss the
fact that Jane (or Heigl) is an extraordinarily attractive woman. Even
prettier than the sister who is granted extremely attractive herself, but
has supposedly overshadowed Jane all her life.
We first
meet Jane as she is trying to juggle two weddings in the same night — cabbing back and forth across Manhattan for two extremely different themed
receptions. It's a new-millennium adult version of the old-sitcom
staple where someone has two dates for the same night and thinks they can
pull it off without anyone noticing.
Turns out
that Jane has a closet in her apartment bursting open with 27 unusable
bridesmaid dresses from weddings she has been part of... thus the movie's
title. However, it's okay, she loves weddings and has become sort of
an unofficial wedding planner for all of her friends — helping set up the
ceremony, choose the menu, holding the dress up when the brides have to go
to the bathroom.
She also
obsessively reads the society pages of the local paper, particularly loving
the writing of one writer who brings all the wonder of the ceremony to life.
Of course it is no big surprise that she eventually meets the writer (played
by James Marsden of Hairspray and Enchanted), who turns out to
be a complete cynic when it comes to love and marriage.
From the
very beginning you know where this is all going. Will Jane win over
her boss? Will she fall for the cynical writer who she hates at first
sight? Hmmmm, I wonder...
In fact,
sadly, I even sort of expected the "Bennie and the Jets" karaoke scene.
I couldn't have predicted the song, but you just knew that Jane would break
out of her shell by drunkenly singing some old pop hit somewhere along the
line here. It was an odd song choice and the incorrect lyrics would
have probably been a lot funnier if I, too, were drunk, but what the hell...
it's a romantic comedy staple now, for better or worse.
Still,
Heigl makes all this formula bearable. Add to that a wicked
performance by Judy Greer, playing her jaded sex-obsessed best friend, who
also adds much-needed bite to the proceedings. For these two
accomplished actresses alone, 27 Dresses is worth the time.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2008 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved.
Posted: January 29, 2008.
