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Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, Malin Ackerman, Edward Burns, Brian Kerwin.  Written by Aline Brosh McKenna.  Directed by Anne Fletcher.  Rated PG-13.  107 minutes.  20^th Century Fox. 

I gave in to 27 Dresses, the new comedy about an eternal bridesmaid looking for love, featuring Katherine Heigl in a star-making performance as a lonely New Yorker and default wedding planner pining for a hunky boss who to her dismay becomes engaged to her vapid sister.  It’s a broad, contrived, sometimes clumsy yet sometimes wistful movie, and at the end I felt good.  What can I say?  

A life-long love affair with weddings finds Manhattan executive assistant Jane (Heigl) a faithful bridesmaid but never a bride.  She lives alone, clipping out love stories of married couples from the “Commitments” section of the New York Journal (read: Times).  Her hidden love for her environmentally-friendly boss (Edward Burns, good to see after his One Missed Call debacle) hits a major roadblock when her coltish younger sister (Malin Ackerman) arrives in town, on the make, and the pair falls head over heels and heads straight to the altar.  What’s worse than planning your own sister’s wedding to the man you secretly love? 

Enter cynical Kevin Bradley (a warm James Marsden), the writer who reviles weddings as “corporate revenue streams” yet pens the popular, sappy sentiments on which Jane hangs her own dreams. They meet cute and meet cute again at wedding receptions, a clash of romantic idealism and pessimism.  You can see where this is going.  

Too cute by half, the film aggressively courts its target audience—young professional women—with a pastiche of candy-colored offices, zippy wedding montages, sisterly bonding, dippy best girlfriends, dreamboat potential hubbys and a chic downtown milieu screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna traversed to greater effect in The Devil Wears Prada, a truly savvy comedy with a zinger of an edge in the form of Meryl Streep.  La Streep’s relish is absent this time around, and 27 Dresses registers as an innocuous sweet tart to its more devilishly hip predecessor.  No matter. 

As demonstrated in last year’s raucous comedy Knocked Up,  Heigl is a real movie star with commitment and versatility both as an unexpectedly pregnant yuppie and here as a sweet, supportive sister and friend waiting for her own storybook to unfold. Of course, 27 Dresses requires a considerable level of suspended disbelief in that a catch like Heigl wouldn’t have scores of eligible men at her feet. 

And though the filmmakers have attempted in vain to mute her sunny beauty with dark and sensible tresses, Heigl positively beams onscreen and so thoroughly plays every note this character, so largely and so invested and at times, exhausting even, that she nearly wears you out with her manic comedy.  From unpredictable line deliveries to funky physicality while simultaneously wringing your heart, musing about when love will find her, she delivers a memorable star turn.  And gets a lot of laughs. 

Marsden, a dependable, working actor for the past couple decades, has come into his own in the last few years, following his recent musical and comedic successes in Hairspray and Enchanted with a solid romantic leading man performance that should finally put him on the A-list where he belongs.  It is clear he is enjoying his time onscreen with Heigl, and by the time the two end up performing a drunken, impromptu faux-karaoke Benny and the Jets to an upstate local yokel bar crowd, the film really takes off on their chemistry. 

Ultimately 27 Dresses, the kind of film which some love to dismiss as a chick-flick, has a few things to day about being true to yourself and being open to love.  Sure, sure, nothing we haven’t seen before but no less fun for it.  Enjoy it—I won’t stop you. 

- Lee Shoquist