This Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn comedy vehicle is built on an intersting premise - two guys who should be well past their "irresponsible years" subscribe to the strange and unique hobby of crashing wedding. It's like their version of Never-never Land. Each year during "wedding season" they go out and attend the weddings (and especially the wedding parties) of people they don't know, with the express end of sleeping with women who they meet at these parties. This covers the first half-hour of the film, and viewers are kept chuckling with ludicrous backstories that the boys present, as well as several shots of topless women.
The film goes downhill after that.
John (Owen) meets Claire (an unusually radiant Rachel McAdams) at one wedding, decides that she's the girl he will sleep with, then inexplicably falls for her in one swift stroke of the screenwriter's pen. Jeremy (Vince) is aghast, and is suddenly reduced to the slapstick punchline of Three Stooges-class physical comedy for the rest of the movie. What began as a rollicking buddy heist film flops into a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy that isn't all that romantic.
To make things worse, Wedding Crashers clocks in at a bloated two hours. If the screenwriter and editor had any feel for pacing, they could have had a much better movie with some judicious rewriting and editing. There's too much of the family (although I will never begrudge Christopher Walken screentime) and Jeremy's very strange relationship with Claire's baby sister could easily have been trimmed down. Finally, Dobkin doesn't get any heat from the pairing of Wilson and McAdams, which is a shame as Rach has never looked this fetching in any film I've previously seen her in.
Bottom Line: Fun first 30 minutes, but feel free to skip the rest of the film unless you just feel like watching Rachel.
1 comment:
Fuck that this movie is fricken awesome.
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