Wedding Crashers movie review

Director: David Dobkin
Cast: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, Will Ferrell, (119 min. PG13LN)

Charming performers and witty ideas keep this sexy farce buoyant for about an hour. While Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan are riding the roller-coaster of their weird libido the movie is hilarious. Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher add sparkle with their adroit, intelligent performances. But then the movie gets all serious, introducing guilt into the sexual equation and it loses its focused comedy drive and dwindles into prolonged self-indulgent mush.

They are calling them “The Frat-Pack”, that little club of male comedy actors that includes Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Vince Vaughan, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon and the Wilson brothers, Owen and Luke. They pretty much dominate mainstream American comedy right now. They are the WASP-equivalent of performers like Ice Cube, Chris Rock, Chris Tucker, Anthony Anderson and their film make millions. “The wedding Crashers” actually defied the law of box-office gravity and opened in the number three place and then pushed upwards into the number one spot, a very rare reversal of the typical trend. The secret lies not in the script but in the individual style of the performers. The script is a highly predictable, amiable comedy, the male equivalent of a chick-flick, a “Men Behaving Badly” fantasy that drifts along quite happily on a burst of testosterone. It’s improbable, there’s no real-life logic in the story but that’s part of its charm. Like “Shanghai Noon”, the previous collaboration between Owen Wilson and director David Dobkin, it assembles a whole bunch of clichés from a particular genre, drenches them in satire, and let’s them fall into place.

The story is about two businessmen John Beckwith (Owen Wilson) Jeremy Grey (Vince Vaughan)who are emotionally immature and so phobic about forming a relationship that they don’t even date conventionally. They assume false names and go to weddings to which they have not been invited. A wedding is always full of people of who don’t know each other and the girls are all feeling romantic and swoony because of the wedding schmaltz, and that makes getting laid so much easier.

It works like a charm until they make wrong choices. Jeremy picks up a kinky, sexually insatiable, would-be stalker and John falls under the spell of a genuinely nice, warm, charming girl played by Rachel McAdams. Let me interrupt this review and say - Keep an eye on this girl. She’s on a dizzy upward career swing and with films like “Mean Girls” and “The Notebook” on her CV she’s building a solid body of work. In this film she gets to play in her first solid-gold hit movie and she aces it. In a year or two Rachel McAdams will be getting all the jobs that that Julia Roberts is now too old to do.

Now back to the movie. After years of sliding into post-wedding reception beds and out of them without ever being caught, these two girls engage these guys in a way they have never experienced before but they are waist-deep in lies and for them to tell the truth, would be like being hit by an avalanche. Their heads say “Run”, their hearts say “Stay” and while they dither they have to cope with little crises like Jane Seymour doing a topless seduction scenes, a gay brother who wants to nab his sister’s new boyfriend, and a psychotic jock who would like to se them both leave on a stretcher. These are likeable, nimble performers, especially Vince Vaughan whose manic energy raises the game Owen Wilson who has to actually give a performance that is not just a series of lazy smiles. The film is delightful until it decides to turn and steers itself into PC territory and starts to sound like an hour with Oprah or Dr.Phil. We have to watch Owen Wilson to wallow in re-criminatory self-pity for what seems like hours and that really kills the mood. The last third of the film also gives a huge cameo role to the odious Will Ferrell who is rapidly becoming the most smug, boring and repetitive comedian on screen. As a result, this light footed romp starts to feel really long and dragged-out with an ending that, after the raunchy start, feels like a PC sell-out.

• This is review is re-published with permission from Barry Ronge. Please visit his website Rather Ronge for more movie reviews by South Africa’s #1 movie critic.

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