dgave

"The Russian Bride" is an interesting film with riveting performances by the principals, namely, Lia Williams, Sheila Hancock and Douglas Hodge. Hancock, as the crazed and domineering mother of the mail-order bride's hapless husband, is outstanding. The story is good, too. Of course it ought to be good because it is a scene-by-scene, uncredited, ripoff of Emile Zola's novel, "Therese Raquin," which has been filmed at least a half-dozen times with due credit to the author. The characters' names, the era and locale are changed in "The Russian Bride," but otherwise it's the same. I can't believe some guy is credited as "writer." I gave this film 3 stars; I would have given it 7 stars if it had just credited the actual writer.

Tom (Ashton Kutcher), a working-class boy, and Sarah (Brittany Murphy), a wealthy girl, meet, fall in love, move in together and then get married, all in very short order and against her family's wishes. Their honeymoon promptly turns into a nightmare of mishaps (most of them, unfortunately, not funny) and misunderstandings. Then it degenerates into an escalating contest of pranks aimed at each other -- kind of like Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in the 1989 dark comedy "War of the Roses" but dumber and more juvenile. Finally they've had enough and return from their Venetian honeymoon early, and separate.

This movie raises at least one question: Why in the world would Tom want to be married to Sarah? He is a good-natured bumbler and most of the missteps he makes are unintentional or harmless. She, on the other hand, is one cruel lady. Among other things, she withholds sex for virtually their entire honeymoon and she takes off for a day and most of a night with an ex-lover who happens to show up at their honeymoon hotel in Venice. Worse, she falsely reports to a Customs official that Tom is carrying hashish in his anus, causing him to be subjected to a body-cavity search. Then she laughs at him when he limps in pain onto the airplane. Enough said.