27 Dresses

My review of 27 Dresses is in this week's Westender.

27 Dresses Review
by Andrea Warner

27 Dresses is the perfect film to help you fight holiday weight gain: light and bubbly, it goes down easy like a Diet Coke, but packs just enough bite to satisfy.

Starring Katherine Heigl (Knocked Up, Grey’s Anatomy), 27 Dresses is pretty standard romantic comedy fare. Formulaic and familiar, we know our heroine will be beautiful but put-upon, klutzy but “relatable”, and destined to fall for the man she argues with the most.

Heigl is Jane, an eager-to-please romantic in love with weddings. When her spoiled younger sister breezes back in to town and ends up engaged to the boss Jane’s loved passively for eight years, Jane’s life goes into a tailspin. Enter James Marsden (X-Men, Hairspray, Enchanted) as the handsome but jaded reporter looking for a juicy story.

Though we’ve seen all of this before, 27 Dresses manages to keep things surprisingly fresh. The dialogue has moments of genuine comedic wit, the costuming is alternately hideous or beautiful as appropriate, and the casting is spot on.

Heigl and Marsden share a nice, playful chemistry, and Judy Greer as Jane’s boozy best friend is a treat as always, even if criminally under-used. Ed Burns is perfect as the blandly handsome and oblivious do-gooder boss Jane has spent years idolizing.

But really, there’s just one girl on the poster, and that’s Heigl. Charming and stunning, it would be easy to be distracted by Heigl’s beauty, but her line delivery is so great and natural throughout the film that she effortlessly becomes the funny girl you cheer for when she gets the happy ending you saw coming a mile away.

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268 words