Bride Hard

A secret agent in a bridesmaid's dress, and a wedding held at gunpoint. That's the setup of 'Bride Hard', the action comedy Simon West released in 2025 with Rebel Wilson in the lead. West, who made 'Con Air' and 'Lara Croft: Tomb Raider', works from a script by Shaina Steinberg, based on a story she wrote with CeCe Pleasants Adams, and the title makes no secret that the template is 'Die Hard'. It also puts Wilson back alongside Anna Camp, her co-star in 'Pitch Perfect'.

Sam (Wilson) and Betsy (Camp) have been friends for more than thirty years, though lately it's been wearing thin. Sam is an agent for a firm that runs classified missions, and the job swallows everything else. She throws Betsy's hen party in Paris while running an operation a few streets away, and when she vanishes from the celebrations Betsy hands the maid of honour role to Virginia (Anna Chlumsky), her future sister-in-law.

Nudged by her handler Nadine (Sherry Cola), Sam turns up to the wedding anyway. It's being held on the private island estate that the groom Ryan (Sam Huntington) and his family own near Savannah, Georgia. The best man Chris (Justin Hartley) is there, and so are the bridesmaids Lydia (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) and Zoe (Gigi Zumbado), but nobody is especially pleased to see Sam. She's on the point of leaving when a team of mercenaries led by Kurt (Stephen Dorff) seizes the estate and holds the guests hostage to get at whatever the family keeps in its vault. Now it falls to Sam to save the wedding she'd been pushed out of.

Filming took place in Savannah in July and August 2023, during the actors' strike, under an interim agreement from SAG-AFTRA. Wilson needed stitches after being hit in the face with the butt of a gun in a fight scene. Ryan Shore wrote the score, and Yoshiki wrote the song 'Butterfly' for the film, sung by the group Bi-ray. Magenta Light Studios opened it in American cinemas on 20 June 2025, while Signature Entertainment picked up the UK and Ireland rights back in 2023. Critics were brutal: 30 out of 100 on average across the 13 outlets collected by Movienco. In March 2026 it won Wilson the Razzie for Worst Actress, with Dorff and Chlumsky nominated in the supporting categories.

• Action
• Comedy