\n\t\t\tTHE BRIDE\t\t<\/h2>\n ZERO STARS. Running time: 127 minutes. Rated R (strong\/bloody violent content, sexual content\/nudity and language). In theaters March 6.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Leave her at the altar!<\/p>\n
She is \u201cThe Bride,\u201d one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a struck-by-lightning shocker to see a big Hollywood studio\u2019s riff on a story as old and over-explored as \u201cFrankenstein,\u201d starring an Oscar winner and two nominees no less, be so slathered in ineptitude.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet, only seconds in, I regretted leaving my trusty torch and pitchfork at home.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cKnock, knock,\u201d goes the first line in writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal\u2019s confounding script, which was perhaps scribbled down at 4 a.m. in a dream journal. It\u2019s spoken by Jessie Buckley, who\u2019s up for Best Actress in 11 days.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
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\n\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJohnny Oleksinski<\/span>\u201cWho\u2019s there?,\u201d replies the same deranged woman, apparently talking to herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s me, Mary Shelley, author of \u2018Frankenstein\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
A feeling of paralyzing dread crept in. There is another two hours and five minutes of this?!<\/em><\/p>\nChristian Bale and Jessie Buckley star in director Maggie Gyllenhaal\u2019s terrible riff on \u201cFrankenstein,\u201d \u201cThe Bride.\u201d AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nMary, who died in 1851, is trapped in a dark shadowy Limbo between the world and the afterlife.\u00a0There, she rambles in sing-songy, literary gibberish with the overzealousness of a haunted house employee on payday.<\/p>\n
To live on, Mary Mary Quite Unscary decides to spiritually possess a mobster\u2019s girlfriend named Ida (also Buckley) in 1930s Chicago. Oh, it gets worse and worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After Ida has a foul-mouthed, supernatural outburst at a restaurant, a man pushes her down the stairs and kills her. For now, anyway.<\/p>\n
Because then the famous horror creature (Christian Bale) arrives in the Windy City, still with gruesome stitches all over his face and neck even though he\u2019s more than a century old. Bale, in another silly transformation, has the breathy voice of the Elephant Man, but pervier, like Joseph Merrick is ogling a stripper.<\/p>\nThe monster, who goes by Frankenstein (Bale), arrives in Chicago looking for a girlfriend. AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nChicago has the Cubs, Lake Michigan and its very own resident mad scientist named Dr. Euphronious, played by Annette Bening, who\u2019s as stiff as the corpses her character dreams of reanimating. In Chi-Town, the hulk orders up some six-foot-deep dish.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m looking for an intercourse,\u201d the horny monster who goes by Frankenstein says to her.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs this about sex, Frank?,\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n
Yup. He longs to experience the whole \u201cgarden of pleasures\u201d and enjoy a \u201crelationship.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sold, the doc pumps high voltage electricity into Ida\u2019s dead body and Frankenstein finally gets his coveted bride.<\/p>\nThe Bride (Buckley) is possessed by the spirit of the late Mary Shelley. AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nFor some inexplicable reason, Mary continues to inhabit Ida and Buckley becomes Jekyll and Bride, switching erratically between an amped-up British accent and a Midwest flapper\u2019s yap. The split-personality shtick makes zero sense and I couldn\u2019t follow anything she said.<\/p>\n
So far Gyllenhaal\u2019s film has slumped in a fog of laugh-less confusion as it strains to be stylish while having no unique sense of style.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Its dirty-clown aesthetic is \u201cJoker: Folie \u00e0 Deux.\u201d Its execution is \u201cJoker: Folie \u00e0 Deux.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now comes the time to exhume a feminist twist from the graveyard.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The film shifts into \u201cBonnie and Bride.\u201d Whenever awful men wrong Bride, the duo brutally murder them.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe film\u2019s aesthetic is \u201cJoker: Folie \u00e0 Deux.\u201d Its execution is Joker: Folie \u00e0 Deux.\u201d AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nTheir ZzzzZzzzzZzzz crime spree begins outside a nightclub where a thug tries to rape her. Angry Frankenstein \u201ccurbs\u201d him, meaning he puts the jerk\u2019s head on the sidewalk and crushes his skull with his foot.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the run, they flee the cops on a train to New York City, where Frank stalks a Fred Astaire-like Hollywood star named Ronnie Reed (Maggie\u2019s brother Jake Gyllenhaal).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Because he\u2019s fanatically obsessed with Ronnie\u2019s black-and-white musical films, which all look fake, there is a pointless, sexualized company dance number to \u201cPuttin\u2019 on the Ritz,\u201d not so much nodding to Mel Brooks\u2019 \u201cYoung Frankstein\u201d as defiling it.<\/p>\n
As their drawn-out, uninteresting antics go on and on, Frank and Bride are pursued by two cliched detectives \u2014 Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz). You won\u2019t be surprised to learn that she\u2019s the real brains behind the partnership, but Jakes gets all the credit. <\/p>\n
The movie\u2019s obvious message \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m not the Bride of <\/em>anybody!\u201d \u2014 is foghorn loud yet completely ineffective, a la \u201cKids, don\u2019t go subway surfing.\u201d<\/p>\nFrankenstein is obsessed with a Hollywood star named Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBale and Buckley\u2019s acting is committed, oh yes. To a fault. Never do you believe them in these poorly constructed roles or sympathize with their us-against-the-world plight.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Buckley especially needed to be reined in. She brought me back to her performance as Sally Bowles in London\u2019s West End production of \u201cCabaret.\u201d When she can\u2019t think of anything else to do, she throws her head back and laughs maniacally.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bale blends Batman and Gollum.<\/p>\nThe duo are chased by a pair of detectives, Jake (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna (Penelope Cruz). AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nGyllenhaal\u2019s 2021 directorial debut \u201cThe Lost Daughter,\u201d which starred Buckley and Olivia Colman, was fantastic and unsettling; a brilliant note to begin on.<\/p>\n
After the repellent sludge that is \u201cThe Bride,\u201d she must bring her skill for simple, psychological storytelling back from the dead.<\/p>\n
The end credits song here, I kid you not, is \u201cMonster Mash.\u201d The capper on this monster mush.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source celebrity.land \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"movie review THE BRIDE ZERO STARS. Running time: 127 minutes. Rated R (strong\/bloody violent content, sexual content\/nudity and language). In theaters March 6. Leave her at the altar! She is \u201cThe Bride,\u201d one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job. It\u2019s a struck-by-lightning shocker to see a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2312645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25174],"tags":[354433,357797,21741,336188,304995,21912],"class_list":["post-2312644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gossip","tag-annette-bening","tag-christian-bale","tag-entertainment","tag-jessie-buckley","tag-movie-reviews","tag-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Jessie-Buckleys-latest-is-one-of-the-worst-movies-Ive.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2312644"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2312646,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312644\/revisions\/2312646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2312645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2312644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2312644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2312644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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