“I know how this ends,” Jacob (Taylor Lautner) snaps at Bella (Kristen Stewart) in the mawkish, intermittently gory “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1,” “and I’m not sticking around to watch!”
Tween audiences likely won’t agree, but really, who can blame him? Poor Bella. All she ever wanted was to get into the pants of hottie vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who once sat next to her in science class. But if there’s a moral that teenage girls can take away from these films based on Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular novels, it is this: Lust doesn’t pay.
Bella’s been beaten, bitten, driven to suicidal depression and nearly murdered over the course of the past three films. She fares no better in “Breaking Dawn — Part 1,” when her first time with new husband Edward leaves her not only bruised from head to toe, but impregnated with his demon spawn, devouring her from the inside.
Still, it was a beautiful wedding.
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Director Bill Condon (“Kinsey,” “Dreamgirls”) hits his stride at the film’s start with a satisfyingly lavish spectacle, starring an awkward Bella teetering down the aisle in high heels (and trying not to dwell on her Boschian nightmare of the night before, in which she and Edward leer over a wedding-cake-shaped pile of guests’ bloody bodies).
Welcome bit players surface to give funny toasts. Bella’s dad Charlie (Billy Burke) reminds his new son-in-law he’s a cop who owns a gun; Anna Kendrick’s Jessica reveals an awesome high school nickname for Edward: “The Hair.”
But it all goes wrong just when it should go right: Bella and Edward’s long, long, long-awaited honeymoon sex scene is the most anticlimactic deflowering since Jennifer Jason Leigh’s in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (an old-timer’s movie, kids!) One shot of Pattinson’s muscular arms snapping the headboard in two, and it’s the next morning at their Brazilian island villa. Bella doesn’t even get a chance to enjoy the afterglow, as Edward’s already telling her how sorry he is to have roughed her up. “I’m not,” she says, in an uncharacteristic display of not agreeing with everything he says. “Don’t ruin this for me.”
Too late! Because . . . she’s late.
Then everything’s all soap-operatic close-ups and weirdly political hand-wringing. “We’ll get that thing out,” Edward vows, while Bella clutches her already-bulging stomach protectively.
The rest of the Cullen family (Peter Facinelli, Nikki Reed, Kellan Lutz, Ashley Greene and Jackson Rathbone) resurface and engage in a debate about whether to use the term “fetus” or “baby.” (When their work is done here, perhaps they can be dispatched to Mississippi.)
Condon’s not doing anyone any favors with his relentlessly tight facial shots: the hair and makeup budget for this film seems to have been reallocated to the humor department (there are actually a handful of intentional laughs, in between the groaners). Reed and Facinelli in particular look like their wigs were left out in the rain in between movies.
Good old Jacob, the hotheaded werewolf Bella loves (but only as a friend), doesn’t have much to do in this installment besides stomping around vowing to make someone pay for Bella’s increasingly skeletal condition, communing with his wolf pack in abysmal CGI, and in the film’s absolutely creepiest moment, “imprinting” on Bella’s baby daughter, which means she’s his destined soul mate.
As Bella — very reminiscent of Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby” — sips a Styrofoam cup of O-negative and nears her due date, Condon seems to regain his momentum. The film’s final, bloody act, which sees the birth of Bella and Edward’s baby via vampire cesarean (it’s what you think), almost but not quite makes up for the past hour of overwrought living-room histrionics and muddled wolf-vampire skirmishes.
Finally comes the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Bella opens her eyes, reborn as a vampire. But any real payoff — seeing her get the chance to stop being such a darn pushover — is delayed until next fall, when “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2” arrives in theaters.
Pattinson, who seems pretty well aware of how ridiculous this has all gotten, sums it up nicely. “Well,” Edward says to his emaciated, blood-slurping bride, “they say the first year is the hardest!”