"Bride Wars" isn't bad enough to be a good bad movie.

It isn't good, either. It's apathy incarnate. It's the Bride of Floppenstein, a C-minus, a soggy, sad thing floating in a lukewarm limbo of sentimental mediocrity. If you removed the script's cliches and platitudes, the film would contract to the length of a preview trailer.

This is the sort of women's comedy that is photographed to look like pages from a glossy lifestyle magazine and presents catty quips as if expressions of sublimated hostility were pearls of wit.

Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson play lifelong friends who have always shared a dream of an elegant June wedding at New York City's Plaza Hotel. Hathaway grows up to become a congenitally people-pleasing grade school teacher, and Hudson becomes a barracuda lawyer. They turn into mortal enemies when the events are booked on the same day, making them rivals for services, venues and guests.

The story is haphazard, but once you're past the title sequence, certain developments are a given. You know that sabotage will be planned, hair will be pulled and the pair will do lots of hugging and learning in the last reel.

These are not spoilers. There is no novelty here to be protected. You do not expect films such as this to mine rich new seams of creative material. But is an occasional surprise too much to ask? Evidently so.

The best-case scenario would be Hathaway setting the bar of performance high and Hudson stretching to reach her co-star's level of professionalism. You guessed it: Hathaway stoops to the level of Hudson, who would probably be a squinty blond office temp if she weren't the daughter of Goldie Hawn.

Hudson's face is so inexpressive she looks like the victim of a drive-by Botoxing, and she swallows her lines in a rolling mumble. Hudson usually coasts on her innate adorability, but here she's playing a hard-edged career woman, and without perky cuteness, she's got nothin'.

Hathaway has a smile you can hardly help returning, though here she uses it to indicate punchlines. That's rather bush league, but we would probably miss the low-wattage jokes unless she pointed them out.

Candice Bergen is on hand as a ritzy dragon lady wedding planner, a faint echo of Meryl Streep's razor-tongued magazine editor in "The Devil Wears Prada," and Kristen Johnston (from TV's "Third Rock From the Sun") dithers as Hathaway's frenemy co-worker. You get the feeling that they weren't anyone's first choice for those roles, but then again it's hard to imagine "Bride Wars" being any actress' first choice, either.