The Wedding Crashers Review

by [email protected] (Ssg722 AT aol DOT com)
July 14th, 2005
Susan Granger's review of "Wedding Crashers"

    Everyone seems to be looking for laughs these hot, sticky days, yet they're few and far between. So if you found "Old School," "Animal House," "There's Something About Mary" and "American Pie" funny, then this R-rated farce is for you.

    John Beckwith (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy Klein (Vince Vaughn) are divorce arbitrators who amuse themselves by crashing weddings, an event they've discovered that causes women to "throw their inhibitions to the wind." Seduction is what's on their minds as they win vulnerable feminine hearts by dancing with the flower girl and extolling the virtues of Oprah's book club. This is chronicled in a cleverly-edited montage at Irish, Italian, Greek and Jewish nuptials.

    All's well until the womanizers crash a Washington D.C. politico wedding in which they become romantically involved with the two bridesmaid daughters (Rachel McAdams, Isla Fisher) of U.S. Treasury Secretary William Cleary (Christopher Walken) and his sex-starved wife (Jane Seymour) and get invited for a weekend at the family home on the Chesapeake Bay. (Think of the naughty but legendary Kennedy mayhem and hi-jinks at the Hyannis compound.)

    Screenwriters Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, along with director David Dobkin ("Shanghai Knights"), relish the off-color raunchiness of this buddy comedy, obviously encouraging Wilson and Vaughn to ad-lib amusingly and indulge in riffs on masturbation, adultery, nudity, even gay bondage, all heavily peppered with political satire and profanity. And Will Ferrell makes a brief app earance. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "The Wedding Crashers" is a sophomoric 7. Yeah, it's contrived and formulaic but - for those who enjoy this kind of humor - it's also fun.

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