Some girls dream about dress-ups and princesses; others fantasize about their knights in shining armor saddled on white horses. Still others dream about becoming brides and having big, glorious weddings. In 27 Dresses, the girls fit into this latter group, except for the protagonist, who revels in the fact that she’s helped friends with their “perfect” weddings without getting married herself.
Jane Nichols (Katherine Heigl) has always been fascinated and entranced with weddings, and she has made it a personal mission to focus on the happiness of her friends as they walk down the aisle. The audience first sees Nichols struggling to attend two weddings at the same time, changing bridesmaid dresses at the back of a taxi cab while she comissions the driver to take her back and forth from one wedding to the next. After a small accident during the throwing of the bouquet in the Indian-Jewish wedding she attends, Nichols finds herself on the floor and facing a young man who proceeds to help her up and escort her home.
Harsh words were exchanged between Nichols and the cynical man named Kevin—later revealed as writer Malcolm Doyle (James Marsden)—and more is unveiled about Nichols’ overly zealous and altruistic hobby. The plot is helped along by Doyle picking up Nichols’ planner, which listed all of the scheduled weddings she was asked to attend—an unnatural obsession which Doyle planned to write an article about in order to climb the ranks of the writing world.
The movie also introduces George (Edward Burns), the boss that Nichols is madly in love with. As George’s assistant, Nichols does everything in her power to make her boss happy in hopes that he will return her feelings, even to the disgust of her friend Casey (Judy Greer). To add even more complications, Nichols’ sister Tess (Malin Akerman) comes to visit and causes George to fall head over heels in love with her. Minutes later, we find that Tess and George are to marry, with a heartbroken Nichols being dragged along to do all the planning in the process.
There is much development in Nichols’ character, which Heigl portrays splendidly. 27 Dresses showed the change of a dreaming pushover to a woman who finally realizes that the only way to keep her sanity in certain situations is to refuse the requests of others. Marsden also does a fine job playing the ambitious journalist Doyle, who first comes off as a cynic forced into writing about weddings but later on turns into a man with a soft side for marital occasions.
Of course, we mustn’t forget the supporting actresses who gave the story a humorous air. Akerman portrayed Tess as a comical yet sexy “Bridezilla” while Greer brought the seductive and wildly outspoken Casey to life. Both Greer and Akerman acted as foils to Heigl’s overly gracious character, and both did an extremely great job at it.
27 Dresses is, admittedly, another one of those chick-flick movies that can be detected in past films (The Holiday and The Wedding Planner, anyone?). Though the actors are much to praise 27 Dresses for, the movie’s predictability and unoriginal plot is definitely lackluster. The most interesting event that took place in the film itself was probably Jane’s retelling of each and every one of her 27 bridesmaid dresses. Each dress design was over-the-top and almost too uncanny to be used in actual weddings, but it does show that people are bound to have different tastes. From a cowboy wedding to an underwater wedding, it seemed as if Jane really did experience them all. It’s only a shame that the rest of the story wasn’t captivating enough for viewers to remember it that well.
