Yeah, &#8220;Bride Wars&#8221; is only a chick flick, but chicks deserve better than this.</p><p>Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Liv (Kate Hudson) are suburban Jersey girls who grew up together dreaming of their own perfect weddings &#8212; ceremonies orchestrated by New York&#8217;s best wedding planner and held at the historic Plaza Hotel.</p><p>Today Emma is a sweet, unassertive, financially challenged middle-school teacher. Liv is her polar opposite, a cutthroat attorney with a panoramic view of Midtown Manhattan and a fat bank account.</p><p>But they remain best friends. It figures that they become engaged in the same week.</p><p>A scheduling error finds both women booked to be wed at exactly the same time in different rooms at the Plaza. This means Liv and Emma cannot serve as each other&#8217;s maid of honor as planned. And their mutual friends will have to decide which wedding to attend.</p><p>All would be well if only one of them would cancel (or if they would agree to a double wedding), but they&#8217;re too stubborn for that. This means war.</p><p>Emma sabotages Liv by anonymously sending her irresistible candies and cookies. Soon the bride-to-be cannot squeeze into her Vera Wang wedding dress.</p><p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t alter a Vera Want to fit you &#8230; you alter yourself to fit Vera,&#8221; she wails.</p><p>Liv retaliates and Emma emerges from a tanning salon the color of a fireplug. So Emma dyes Liv&#8217;s hair blue.</p><p>These are best friends, remember?</p><p>Here&#8217;s the problem: Both of these women behave like raving idiots. You can&#8217;t root for either of them, and the peripheral characters &#8212; the grooms are played by Brian Greenburg and Chris Pratt, the high-powered wedding planner by Candice Bergen &#8212; aren&#8217;t particularly important.</p><p>It&#8217;s possible to make an enjoyable movie about unlikable characters, but it takes a lot more humor and cleverness than is displayed in the screenplay by Casey Wilson (&#8220;Saturday Night Live&#8221;), Greg DePaul (&#8220;Saving Silverman&#8221;) and June Diane Raphael.</p><p>Director Gary Winick made an impressive splash in 2002 with &#8220;Tadpole.&#8221; Since then, he has been reduced to cutesy stuff like &#8220;13 Going on 30&#8221; (and a solid adaptation of <em>Charlotte&#8217;s Web</em>), and he&#8217;s unable to find a way to make &#8220;Bride Wars&#8221; fresh. Pretty much every clich&#233; of the wedding movie gets trotted out, from the bachelorette party with male strippers to a squad of wedding professionals who act like the Secret Service, talking into their shirt cuffs and dropping military jargon.</p><p>An aura of familiarity and desperation hangs over the enterprise. After all, this is the era of &#8220;Bridezillas&#8221; &#8212; every week on TV you can see real-life wedding disasters more interesting than what goes on here.</p><p><hr class="infobox-hr-separator" /> <div class="infobox"> <strong><span class="infobox-head">&#8216;BRIDE WARS&#8217; &#9733; 1/2 </span></strong><br /> <strong>Rated: </strong><strong>PG</strong> for suggestive content, language and some rude behavior</p><p><strong>Running time:</strong> 1:29</p><p></div>