When did chick flicks become so suffused with hatred for womankind? Surely a movie about girls and aimed at girls shouldn’t make us feel so bad about being girls? But Bride Wars, a staggeringly unfunny story about two best friends whose childhood dreams of the perfect wedding turn them into ultra-competitive monster brides, does just that.

The film marks the producing debut of Kate Hudson, who also stars as one of the two horribly self-obsessed women whose clashing nuptial dates trigger a battle in which the weapons are playground spite, acid-drenched bitchiness and chronic over-acting. Whither sisterhood?

With respect to Hudson and her oeuvre, this is perhaps only slightly worse than her usual choice of material. The tragedy here is that the tremendously talented Anne Hathaway is also caught up in this spider’s web of malice and lamentable writing. Hudson plays Liv, an ultra-competitive, high-achieving lawyer, with her eyes narrowed and her jaw thrust forth. Her face looks like a clenched fist – impeccably manicured, of course, but a fist nonetheless.

Hathaway is floaty and doe-eyed as schoolteacher Emma. Unlike Liv, she’s about as thrusting and dynamic as lettuce. But even sweet-natured Emma has claws when it comes to defending her right to the wedding of her juvenile fantasies — fantasies, incidentally, in which the ideal groom was decidedly low on the list of priorities and the only constant was best friend Liv and the venue, the Plaza Hotel in New York.

When they’re not trying to humiliate each other with tangerine fake tan and cerulean lowlights, Liv and Emma yap incessantly at their fiancés. You would feel sorry for the poor guys but for the fact that they are only marginally less irritating than their ladies.

The sorry truth of the matter is that this is a truly disastrous piece of screenwriting. Bitchy feuds can make great cinema — just think of All About Eve or the original George Cukor version of The Women. But Hudson and Hathaway get not a single witty line between them; instead they’re forced to make do with ugly, dull-witted carping and sniping. There’s no piquant repartee, no rollercoaster battle of wits. It’s as elegant as a catfight in a pub toilet at closing time.

Faced with the limitations of the material, the director Gary Winick (13 Going On 30) seems to simply point the camera and hope for the best. A complete absence of direction is the only explanation for the actor playing Emma’s father’s inane grin as his daughter emerges from a brawl with her best friend, dripping tulle and remorseful tears. If Kate Hudson is serious about a career as a producer she’s going to need a better eye for material than she has so far demonstrated.

12A, 90mins

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