July 15, 2005

WEDDING CRASHERS is kinda like an old nemesis of mine. I reviewed it very negatively on The Ain’t It Cool News twenty years ago and though mostly people believed me there were some talkbackers who also saw it in preview screenings who got kinda mad at me. It wasn’t as controversial as my THE TRANSFORMERS pan or anything but I was applying a similar (in retrospect overblown) destructive fury to it – the headline was “Fuck WEDDING CRASHERS.” It was being hailed as a new comedy benchmark, or a return to the raunchy R-rated comedy, but I swore it would fade instantly. I made a challenge to one guy to meet back in two years and see if he still considered it a “comedic gem.” 

If we had followed through on that bet I’m sure I would’ve lost. Its popularity lasted at least five years, which I can clock by realizing in hindsight that this movie is the reason my wife’s younger cousins asked us to play “Shout” by The Isley Brothers at our wedding. But by then THE HANGOVER had come out and I think it quickly replaced WEDDING CRASHERS as the bro comedy of record (no judgment for that – I’d say it’s a funnier movie).

But WEDDING CRASHERS does still exist and it still annoys me in all the ways it did then, minus the freshness of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn riffing together. I may still be in a minority on this, but I think it echoes some of the ‘80s comedies in the sense that removing it from its era sort of breaks its spell and makes you think “Jesus, people used to think this was cute?” It’s about the smooth talking rapscallions who dedicate their lives to attending the weddings of strangers and using a codified playbook of cheap tricks (mostly involving faked sensitivity) to lure in easily tricked women for sex and then ghost them. They are said to somehow attend 17 weddings this “season” alone, with a 100% success rate of pretending to be a relative and hooking up with gorgeous women. They commit multiple layers of stolen valor including carrying purple hearts (thankfully never deployed), repeatedly using the line “we lost alot of good men that day,” and pretending to be Jewish, Italian or Indian, in addition to lying about who they’re related to. But they’re a couple of talkers and they dance with the little kids and somehow get away with making toasts and everyone finds them a delight.

There’s a big montage set to “Shout” that shows them successfully employing variations on the same tricks, then intercuts scenes of dancing, dropping into soft beds with various pairs of ample breasts, then back to the dance floor for ejaculatory champagne bottle openings. But this celebration of their rascally deceitful cocksmanship ends on a note of woe as a woman realizes John (Wilson, ANACONDA) is just using her and leaves, disappointed. He stays in bed regretfully contemplating his empty life of constant crabcakes and titties.

I think that’s why this one bothers me so much – the disingenuous combination of ultra-douchey pickup artist fantasy fulfillment and standard rom-com. By any standards these guys are absolute world record shitheel scumbags, but it’s cutey Owen Wilson and when he spots Claire (Rachel MacAdams fresh off of MEAN GIRLS and THE NOTEBOOK) it really is true love this time, I swear it. Sure, he does the same moves, the same lies, she falls for it exactly the same as his countless abandoned conquests, but this time he knows she’s something special!

John’s best friend/fake brother Jeremy (Vaughn, PSYCHO) wants to flee after he fucks Claire’s nutty sister Gloria (Isla Fisher, THE POOL) on the beach and declares her a “stage 5 clinger,” but John accepts her invitation for the two to join the family at their weekend retreat. Now Jeremy is horrified that the woman he used for sex wants to have more sex with him. Meanwhile, John tries to make an honest(ish) connection with Claire… even though she’s pre-engaged to Sack Lodge (Bradley Cooper, THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN), a non-fraudulent version of the rich sweater-wearing type dudes they’re pretending to be. Needless to say he’s secretly a misogynistic womanizer like our heroes except in a mean way not a cute way so it’s bad in his case and he must be stopped. She deserves better.

Seriously, MacAdams does deserve better. She’s very good in a role that’s 90% smiling and flirting. The movie mostly wants to be wild and raucous, but also it has a night time longing montage set to Coldplay and a laughing and riding bicycles in the sun afternoon date montage.

And at the end it has one of the most egregious ever examples of a rom-com trope I hate: the piece of shit protagonist interrupting his friend’s wedding to make a very long speech that for some reason everyone sits and patiently listens to and somehow it convinces a supposedly reasonable woman to cancel her wedding and leave with a guy who says he still misses her after several months ago when he was able to spend time with her for two days under a false identity because he poisoned her fiancee.

Not that it matters but I think I noticed some timeline issues. At the beginning Jeremy is preparing for John’s birthday, which happens several months later. Also, he proposes to Gloria after Claire’s rehearsal dinner, but then their wedding happens before Claire’s? And this is not chronology related but I still think it’s kind of funny that Sack tells a private eye friend the fake names and fake NGO they bullshitted on the spot and then a while later that guy somehow gets back to him with their real identities and full background of wedding crashing. He must be really good at his job.

There’s another aspect I’d describe as dated, except I called it out at the time. The girls have a cartoonish weirdo brother named Todd (Keir O’Donnell, STARKWEATHER) and I don’t really know how to put it better than I did back then: “There are no surprises or pushing of the comedy envelope unless you count a weird bit where a gay guy is portrayed as a freaky hunchbacked Peter Lorre type who forces himself on straight men. Maybe the MTV Movie Awards will have a category for Best New Homophobic Stereotype.”

(They did not but they did give this Best Movie, Best On-Screen Team [Vaughn and Wilson] and Breakthrough Performance [Fisher].)

I suppose I should mention the strong supporting cast: Christopher Walken (MAN ON FIRE) plays the sisters’ dad – You think god will forgive him? – Jane Seymour (QUEST FOR CAMELOT) is their mom (who makes John touch her refurbished boobs), Henry Gibson (NASHVILLE) is the priest (his penultimate role), there’s a scene with Rebecca De Mornay (RISKY BUSINESS) and Dwight Yoakam (RED ROCK WEST), and uncredited Will Ferrell shows up as dead-eyed loser pioneer of wedding crashing Chazz Reinhold – he seems to be in a much broader and funnier movie and he convinces John to hit on women at a funeral during the time when we are supposed to be taking him seriously as a romantic lead. (Wikipedia claims that Nicolas Cage was considered for the role, which actually could take it to another level.)

There’s also a brief part where John McCain and James Carville are guests at the wedding. Apparently McCain was called a hypocrite for it because he had criticized Hollywood before and then he was in a movie where Vince Vaughn gets jerked off to completion during a family dinner. I will go ahead and also criticize Carville for being in it since I hate the fucking ghoul and I wish he would stop going on TV complaining about “defund the police” and just crawl back into the cursed moonshine jar they found him in.

I didn’t really need to be so aggressive about it, but I was right about WEDDING CRASHERS. There could theoretically be a more STEP BROTHERS or Danny-McBride-esque approach to portraying these obnoxious fuckers that’s funny, but I cannot respect the movie that treats them as cool but also losers but actually they’re sweet and come to think of it they’re cool after all.

The world disagreed with me though. It was well reviewed and became a huge hit for New Line Cinema, making more than 7 times its reported budget in theaters. It was the 6th highest grossing movie of 2005 in the United States and the first ever R-rated comedy to pass $200 million.

The screenplay is by Steve Faber & Bob Fisher (Married… with Children), who later did WE’RE THE MILLERS. Director David Dobkin (ICE CREAM MAN, CLAY PIGEONS, SHANGHAI KNIGHTS) started in music videos, his first two being Tupac’s “Keep Ya Head Up” and “I Get Around”! But I guess he’s not one of those music video directors who’s an amazing visualist. His feature film directing credits since WEDDING CRASHERS are as follows: FRED CLAUS, THE CHANGE-UP, THE JUDGE, and EUROVISION SONG CONTEST: THE STORY OF FIRE SAGA.

There was talk of a sequel for many years, but how would that work – would they be divorcees or serial cheaters? They never figured it out so instead the comedy team of Wilson & Vaughn reunited eight years later for THE INTERNSHIP by visionary director Shawn Levy. And the rest is history for the history books.