Reviewed by Johnny McNair

Fox Home Entertainment – 111 mins – 2008 – Rated PG-13 – 1080p Anamorphic Widescreen 2.40: 1 – DTS HD 5.1 Lossless Audio

Romantic comedies are like horror movies; there are so many of them pumped out of Hollywood per year, but only one or two will actually be successful. Hoping to be the next Pretty Woman or even the new My Big Fat Greek Wedding, 27 Dresses came and went in early 2008, making a good chunk of change at the box office, totaling over $150 million worldwide. Now available on Blu-ray from Fox Home Entertainment, 27 Dresses hopes to draw in the Sex and the City crowd to scoop up some more chick cash.

THE MOVIE

Coming off of the success of Knocked Up and hoping to fill Julia Robert’s shoes as the new queen of romantic comedies, Katherine Heigl plays Jane Nichols, the assistant to a young self made millionaire (Edward Burns), the editor in chief of a Field and Stream styled magazine, who she is secretly in love with. Jane also has an odd hobby; she enjoys attending weddings as a bride’s maid and has 27 dresses from her conquest hidden in her closet to prove it. Her secret is discovered by a journalist, named Kevin Doyle, (James Marsden), who happens to write the wedding column for a major New York newspaper. Kevin gets closer to Jane to get more information for his story, and you guessed it, pretty soon they get the hots for each other. To shake things up, Jane’s sister Tess, (Malin Akerman) comes to town and her boss falls head over heels with her sister spawning a quick marriage proposal. Oh, what’s Jane to do? Her boss who she’s in love with is going to marry her sister, and the cute reporter who follows her around is making it way to easy for her to like him. Well, this is a totally formulaic chick flick, so it doesn’t take a Harvard scholar to figure out how this all resolves. Hint: Jane marries one of them before the ending credits.

As the box office receipts for this movie has proven, there is a huge audience for these types of movies that is mainly fueled by women, and a few boyfriends who are dragged into the theater because they made their girlfriends see Rambo with them. Directed by Anne Fletcher and written by Aline Brosh McKenna, who also wrote the screenplay for another hugely successful romantic comedy, The Devil Wears Prada, and being released on the heels of Valentine’s Day, 27 Dresses was pretty much guaranteed benefit all involved.

On a production level it works, but as a film itself can this be any more simplistic? With a female director and writer behind the helm, why is the lead character still so weak and sitting around waiting for a prince charming to make her life complete? It’s never even clear what goals Jane has for her life other than to win her dream man? Even the ladies of Sex and the City have game plans. The characters in 27 Dresses are all cut and paste right out of a Lifetime Channel movie. And what makes this worse is that there is no chemistry between any of the actors. Katherine Heigl had much more of a confident edge in Knocked Up, but here she is just a pin up girl. Yes, she’s very pretty, but she must have more than that to offer. James Marsden need to stay away from any more of these movies where he plays the pretty boy before he gets type-casted, and Edward Burns does the only thing he is capable of doing, playing an Edward Burns character…again.

If you’re a fan of romantic comedies, you’ve obviously seen much better films than 27 Dresses, but it you just want to sit back, scoop up some Ben & Jerry’s and veg out, then 27 Dresses is harmless couple of hours on a rainy day. If you’re looking for something deeper, you may want to go elsewhere, because on the long list of chick flicks this doesn’t even cut it. Let’s just hope there’s no 28 dresses on the horizon.

VIDEO

Offering a full 1080p image and a 2.40:01 aspect ratio, 27 dresses looks acceptable, but it doesn’t float off of the screen, as you would expect such a colorful film would. There are various spots where the skin tones look great, but then for other scenes the faces look too red and unnatural. Blacks appear to be even, but grain does get slightly heavy in spots. 27 Dresses doesn’t qualify as HD show-off material, but it’s satisfactory.

AUDIO

There are no gunshots or explosions to cover up the plot holes, but 27 Dresses features a DTS HD Lossless 5.1 audio mix that is pretty basic. This is a heavy dialogue film, which sounds fine, and the background sounds of the city are done effectively. But overall, there’s just nothing special about the audio. There’s no reason to crank up the speakers for this one.

EXTRAS

The minuscule batch of extras offered for 27 Dresses are not even worth talking about, and are act more as promotional material than actual bonus features. There is no audio commentary, (let’s be grateful for that), and whatever is here is fluff that you’ll most likely fast forward through.

‘The Wedding Party’ is a 15-minute behind the scenes featurette that looks like it was literally slapped together in 15 minutes . It’s just your average assembled clips of interviews with the filmmakers and cast talking about how incredible this project is, and why there’s enough talent combined on the movie to trigger a supernova.

‘The Running of the Brides’ is a five minute segment that sets women’s rights back fifty years, showing an annual event where real life brides to be basically fight each other for cheap wedding dresses.

‘Jane’s World’ is a five minute featurette that goes into the art direction of the film. The only thing you’ll get out of it is that they made Rhode Island look like New York.

There are three deleted scenes that when viewed will easily be clear why they didn’t make it into the final cut. Luckily, they’re pretty painless, clocking in at just under four minutes combined.

For the HD trailer fans, there’s The Devil Wears Prada and Juno.

BOTTOM LINE

For the retail price of $39.98 ($27.95 on Amazon), it’s hard to recommend anyone purchasing this film, and would actually just encourage you to rent it or get the buy the standard DVD if you really must have it, since the Blu-ray doesn’t offer you anything different. Again, there are better romantic comedies out there to invest your time in, so 27 Dresses, while being a cute idea, just doesn’t have those magical elements that will make you want to see it again after the credits roll.

SCORES (Out of 5):

The Movie: 2.5

Video: 3.0

Sound: 2.5

Extras: 2.0

Bottom Line: 2.5