The First Wives Club

Directed by Hugh Wilson, The First Wives Club follows three college friends (Diane Keaton’s Annie, Goldie Hawn’s Elise, and Bette Midler’s Brenda) as they reunite after the death of a fellow graduate and eventually conspire to get revenge against their philandering husbands. There’s little doubt, ultimately, that The First Wives Club fares best in its briskly-paced and periodically laugh-out-loud funny first half, as filmmaker Wilson, armed with Robert Harling’s screenplay, does an effective job of initially establishing the affable central characters and placing them into a series of amusing sequences and set-pieces (eg the gals make a hasty escape on a rickety window-washing platform) – with the compulsively watchable atmosphere heightened by the efforts of a stacked supporting cast that includes Timothy Olyphant, Dan Hedaya, and Sarah Jessica Parker. It’s disappointing to note, then, that the picture slowly-but-surely loses its grip on the viewer as it moves into an egregiously hit-and-miss midsection, with the progressively less-than-enthralling vibe compounded by a third act overloaded with entirely ineffective plot developments – including an eye-rollingly needless fake-breakup stretch and a desperately, aggressively upbeat final scene. The end result is a disappointing misfire that generally feels like it could (and should) be so much better, which is a shame, ultimately, given that The First Wives Club does possess its fair share of appealing elements (eg the palpable chemistry between the three leads).

** out of ****