Bridesmaids

Kristen Wiig, a five-year SNL regular, teamed up with fellow LA comedy team ("Groundlings") member Annie Mumolo to write a slick chick-flick comedy, Bridesmaids. Wiig featured in Paul and Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, and Apatow helped produce her first self-starring screen effort, alongside Barry Mendel, another successful backer of above-average comedies (from Wes Anderson, Joss Whedon) and weightier dramas (Speilberg, Shyamalan). The direction was handed to movie fresher Paul Feig, a TV veteran (The Office, Arrested Development, Nurse Jackie). They all knew exactly what they were doing: tweaking a formula.

Wiig goes where many TV comics have gone before: into the safe genre of the multi-buddy movie, where a variety of stereotypical characters indulge in stereotypical comic set-pieces. This time, Wiig's group is a quintet of maids of honourable intentions arranging their mutual friend's marital rites.

Envelopes were pushed wickedly, enabling ladies who lunch to chatter about licking male genitals, coping with sons' masturbatory excesses, and shitting on sidewalks in wedding dresses. Happily, such gross scenes are offset by some above-par wit and farcical set-pieces and occasional spots of wryly-written female bonding.

Maya Rudolph (ten-year SNL regular), as the bride-to-be, plays a mature character of colour balancing Wiig's egocentric and dizzy blonde Fey-like late-30s loser. Aussie Rose (Damages) Byrne scintillates as a socially aggressive rich bitch (partnering Wiig marvelously in a doubles tennis match and an extended game of microphone one-up-manship). Wendy McLendon-Covey (another Groundlings member, for nine years) was given some juicily raunchy dialogue as a frustrated suburban mom. Ellie Kemper (from US TV's Office) got the weakest role as a tiny cloistered soul while naturally large Melissa McCarthy has multiple scenery-chewing moments as a fearsomely friendly tomboy who loves dogs and an air marshal (distastefully so, not amusingly, in a bizarre end-credits insert of a love feast including ham slices on his nipples).

Irish comic actor Chris O'Dowd (UK TV's The IT Crowd) provides the movie's major male love interest, as a highway patrol officer, for Wiig's former cakeshop-owner; the other man in her life is a selfish sex interest, nicely self-ridiculed by Greg Tuculescu. There are also some bijou comic roles, an audience-friendly bonus in inventive comedy writing: a twitchy child with a warped mind, obnoxious sibling roommates (Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson), jewelry customers.

As a distaff version of the standard parade of male dirty talk for teenage audiences, Bridesmaids is good entertainment. Not good enough for its inevitable sequel, but neither was Hangover.