Directed by: Paul Feig
Starring: Kristen Wiig, Rose Byrne, Chris O'Dowd, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy
Rating: R

Kristen Wiig (left) and Maya Rudolph star in Bridesmaids. (Courtesy photo)

It's tempting to call Bridesmaids a grown-up Mean Girls; they both were written by Saturday Night Live cast members; they both involve women scheming against other women; and they both pit a homely everywoman against a snooty social queen. But it's not quite the right comparison. Bridesmaids isn't any more grown up than Mean Girls—or, at least, Mean Girls isn't any less grown up than Bridesmaids. If anything, it would be more accurate to call Bridesmaids a grown-up Katherine Heigl movie. Standard plot, standard plot twists, standard resolution—but with welcome moments of sincerity and raunchy humor along the way.

In Bridesmaids, Annie's (Kristen Wiig, TV's Saturday Night Live) best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph, SNL) gets engaged and asks Annie to be her maid of honor. Complete chaos ensues, since Annie wants desperately to give Lillian the best possible wedding shower, bachelorette party, and wedding but lacks the connections and money to do that. Worst of all, Lillian has another friend, Helen (Rose Byrne, 28 Weeks Later), who does have the right connections and unfathomable hordes of money to spend. Meanwhile, as if fighting to keep her best friend weren't enough, Annie is still single, and the closer the wedding gets, the more evident her loneliness becomes. She starts running into a chivalrous cop, Officer Rhodes (Chris O'Dowd, Pirate Radio), but manages to bungle up that relationship before it even starts. Disliked, friendless, and broke, Annie has to get over her own passiveness and self-pitying in time for Lillian's big day. And if she can't do that, the least she can do is get herself together enough to move out of her mother's house.

Paul Feig (who has directed various TV shows, like The Office and Nurse Jackie) directed Bridesmaids, and Judd Apatow, of Knocked Up and Superbad fame, produced, but it's definitely Kristen Wiig's movie. The star wrote the movie with Annie Mumolo (they had been in the famed Los Angeles comedy troupe Groundlings together), and much of the humor throughout the movie contains the reserved denial that anything is funny that Wiig puts to such good use on Saturday Night Live. Of course, without TV censors, Wiig goes all out with swears, bathroom jokes, and crude humor, and most of it makes us laugh, even if the gags aren't original. The movie makes up for its unoriginality a little bit with some refreshingly honest scenes, mainly in the first half. By the second half, though, those scenes are basically gone, and the story plays out with nary a twist or a surprise.

And as Annie stumbles downhill more and more (along with the script), Wiig tries harder and harder to convey swaths of emotion with stoic gazes into the distance. I applaud her joke delivery—that's how she got her job on SNL in the first place—but she has some work to do on her dramatic acting if she's going to make a habit out of starring in movies. Meanwhile, the other bridesmaids (it's easy to forget that the title of this movie is plural) are played with great comedic timing, which forgives some of the one-note characters. Melissa McCarthy (TV's Gilmore Girls) is easily the funniest of the bridesmaids, as the bulging, brazen Megan. She steals all her scenes with her butch vulgarity; even her semi-serious pep talk to Annie turns into a wrestling match. On the whole, no one is given much of a character to play, except Wiig. O'Dowd is charming, Rudolph is all right, Byrne does what she needs to—but no one gets a complete or interesting character to play. They are all minor characters to Wiig's Annie.

Maybe I'm over-critical; maybe I feel underwhelmed because I was expecting a new Tina Fey. Kristen Wiig isn't Tina Fey (yet), but this was only Wiig's first writing credit. She'll get better as she goes along, and the same goes for her acting. It's wrong to see Bridesmaids just because of the premise. The premise is stupid, after all, and so is the story, and so are the characters. But Wiig makes us care, if only a little bit, and she makes us laugh pretty hard at things we've seen before. There's something to be said for that; I just hope she can do it more next time.

Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.