"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Wedding Crashers (20 years later rematch)

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.” 

SUMMER 2005If 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.

 

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37 Responses to “Wedding Crashers (20 years later rematch)”

  1. Hot Tub Time Machine > The Hangover > The Wedding Crashers

  2. the disingenuous combination of ultra-douchey pickup artist fantasy fulfillment and standard rom-com

    Wow, I don’t think I ever read your original review, but this is precisely the problem I had with this movie.

    If Animal House had a final act where Otter, Blutto, D-Day, and the gang realize the error of their ways, and decide to be good students, become serious about their perspective future careers, and vow to become good Christians and family men, you would be “what the fuck is this bullshit?” Which is exactly what this movie tries to pull. It’s chickenshit, smug, and actually made me a little angry.

  3. I bought the DVD 15+ years ago, because one store had a “5 DVDs for 15€” deal and I quickly found four movies that I wanted, but finding a fifth was difficult. So I went with this one, based on its reputation as one of the funniest movies in recent history, but to this day I still haven’t watched it. But hey, thanks for helping me safe 35 bucks, WEDDING CRASHERS!

  4. Vern, I’ve never seen this movie and it’s 100% because of you. Even a few years back when I was catching up on all the comedies I skipped over the previous 15 years, I’d see this one at Goodwill and almost pick it up before reminding myself of your scathing review. So if you ever start thinking your words don’t matter, just remember: You saved me two hours and two bucks.

    I also have to dispute this movie’s entire premise. I’ve been to more than a dozen weddings. I’ve been a single man on the make for at least ten of them. I’ve never met, let alone seduced, a single single woman at any of them. Every woman at every wedding I’ve been to is there with a date. There are no exceptions. Women do not attend weddings without companionship. This is idea of weddings being a free-for-all of horny single ladies looking to hook up with the first swinging dick they see is a fallacy perpetrated by the Hollywood industrial complex to encourage bachelors to spend money on tuxedos. Vince Vaughn is lying to you.

    Wait a minute. I’m actually remembering the time I went home with the maid of honor at my ex-girlfriend’s wedding.

    Forget I said anything. Maybe this movie is a documentary.

  5. I’ve only been to two weddings in my life and felt really uncomfortable talking to anybody, because I only knew the couple and everybody else invited were their friends and family, so I didn’t know anybody. And most of them were couples too, so who would I try to hook up with anyway?

    But you know where I scored? SciFi and Fantasy convention afterparties! I mean, I can’t speak for conventions outside of Germany, but the ones here? You have a hotel full of people who share the same interests, which makes it even for the shyest nerd easy to start a conversation, many singles among them and the percentage of them who fulfill the stereotype of the ugly, unwashed geek of any gender is really low. If even a man of mediocre attractivity (with admittedly glorious hair) and bare minimum social skills like me can wake up more than once in someone else’s bed after a convention, anybody can.
    (Unless you are an asshole. Trust me. Nerds talk. We know who you are!)

    I should write CONVENTION CRASHERS.

  6. Yeah, what can I say, I don’t endorse this movie’s “message,” but I still love it. Wilson and Vaughn are really funny, Rachel McAdams is awesome, the unhinged Isla Fisher character is hilarious, Dwight Yoakum and Rebecca DeMornay are great mutual antagonists, Walken is always solid, and Bradley Cooper (anachronistically) playing radically against type is something to behold as well. Vaughn is really the comedy engine here, and his scence with Henry Gibson as the priest alone makes this worth seeing.

    I have never been one for “Totally Horny Unrated Edition with 2.3 Never-before-scene Titty Scenes” raunch just for the sake of raunch, but I do enjoy pretty much all of the peak frat pack era films, because I think the leads are pretty effortlessly funny and have great chemistry. And this one is about as good as any of them. To the extent that it has one, I think the film’s main message is that, yes, these guys are pathetic, sad, womanizing pieces of shit who need to fucking grow up, and they sort of do, they all lived happily ever after, etc. (+ arguably mild homophobia that I don’t think is intended to be some kind of comment on modal gay experience or something).

  7. CJ, I say open up your laptop and get writing. CONVENTION CRASHERS sounds great.

  8. One part I wondered about is when Jeremy finds out about the wedding from the newspaper and tells John what the foods will be, that there will be 3 bands playing and over 200 single women in attendance. Heavily researched article I guess.

  9. I think I can validate your bet, Vern. I loved this when it came out and figured it would be a perennial. I have it on dvd and have not watched it in the last 20 years. I’m sure I’d still find it ok but the point is I lack the motivation. Maybe you had to be there, as I was at that one screening.

  10. Comedy is a funny thing. It’s such a subjective genre, that it’s almost impossible to discuss. But, by definition the reason we laugh at something is an unexpected punchline to a well known premise. So there are differences between humour where you can see the joke coming a mile away, and the more elaborate set ups. I won’t say that easy, on the nose buffoonery can’t have it’s merits. But personally I tend to prefer the “heavier” stuff. No names, since I don’t want to insult anyone, let’s just say that I saw this movie because of Dwight Yoakam – and found him funnier than the so-called “comedy stars” that have their names above the title.

    Once I ended up in bed with the bride at a wedding, but we were married by then so nobody cared.

  11. It would be almost impossible to crash wedding receptions the way they do it in the movie. Wedding receptions usually have assigned table seating that’s been very carefully planned out by whoever is managing the wedding. You could never get away with just plopping down in a chair and lying that your “Cousin Ned’s kids” because any minute, whoever that chair belonged to will arrive and the jig is up. The premise never made any sense. There are parties you can crash, but weddings are the least likely.

    It’s weird because they don’t even spend most of the movie wedding crashing. The crashing is basically a montage in the beginning, and then most of the movie is about the weekend at the mansion which isn’t a wedding and which they didn’t crash, they were invited (albeit under false pretenses). My point in all this is they didn’t even really need the implausible “wedding crasher” premise to launch this story. There areally all kinds of ways you could write an Act I that more believably steers these characters into a mansion-weekend-rom-com-with-Rachel-McAdams Act II.

  12. I am with you, Vern. Hated this at release, and I was all about Vince Vaughn’s whole schtick at the time. This felt like a layup. And instead it was a dirge. I remember seeing it opening weekend, packed house, place was ROARING and I was like, “for this?” I agree that THE HANGOVER definitely removed it’s shine amongst quoting bros.

  13. This one has a few laughs but is mediocre at best. If you want real hilarity read the archived Talkbalk in Vern’s original review. It’s gold, Jerry, gold!

  14. @clubside I had to carefully re-read that thread to find the reason why it took such a hard turn into the unrelated topic of A24 and all that the brand implies. It turns out a throwaway remark (that I skimmed past on first read) in a long post from Pacman2.0 on the topic of keeping up with current movies even if they might not be to one’s taste – casually using a couple A24 movies as examples – was what put blood in the water.

    The trouble with these lively tangents in the talkbacks is that weeks or months later you want to re-read a particular discussion but it’s challenging to remember which movie review was the unlikely home for it.

  15. While I’m always happy for my trickster antics to be revisited, I do believe Clubside was taking about the *original* original talkback on 2005 AICN

  16. okay, I had to check, like have i gone mental (of course, I have, but that’s beside the point). This joint is Rotten Tomatoes certified fresh w/ critics and 70% w/ audiences. I’m seeing favorable reviews from Peter Travers, BBC, Empire, Slate, Richard Roeper, WaPo, NYT, New Yorker, Salon, the one and only Kurt Loder. I can’t say how Tabitha Soren or Adam Curry feel about it, but I think we both know they love it. So, it’s fine to not like it, but, you bitches and sons thereof are in the minority. Every last one of you. Is what I’m saying. It’s not a war war crime to like it.

    I am not an animal!!

    Okay, deep breath.

  17. I certainly don’t have the venom in me that Vern has for this movie, I have the DVD but recall only watching this once with no particular desire to revisit it. I recall seeing it and experiencing some tonal discord when terminal slacker Wilson is elevated to Romantic Lead and pretty much plays it straight for the second half, leaving the comedic heavy lifting to Vaughn, and then seeing heartthrob Cooper play a mean as fuck douchebag. My memory fails me, but I remember a particularly vicious beating he or his guys give Wilson which had me going “Wait, what’s this scene doing in a raunchy rom-com?

    As for the script giving these guys a pass, I guess I’ve become pretty enured to the fact that since, I don’t know when (PORKY’s?), the bro-comedy has specialized in the redemption if not outright exaltation of over-sexed man-children, who if the script even attempted a stab at realism, would most likely spend their twilight years as lonely, decrepit old men in a run down apartment infested with roaches, if not doing jail time.

  18. Yeah @Curt like @Pacman2.0 added I was referring to the gargantuan AICN Talkback which you can find above Vern’s comment section, you have to expand it by clicking/tapping the black button. I archived all of Vern’s posts and their Talkbacks years ago as Vern’s site will stand the test of time not sure about AICN 😛 where some of these Talkbacks are now truncated or missing entirely so Vern’s the place to be for all things Vern 😃

    Anyway if you expand that AICN Talkback you’ll see a number of epic back-and-forths, some true insanity and a lot of fun. Check it out!

  19. And agree that in real life, a wedding is certainly not the place for quick hook ups. From the perspective of Indian weddings, there are plenty of single girls there but they’re either chaperoned by a Sapphic Cult of Girl Best Friends or by parents who watch hawk-eyed at any approaching interloper with disreputable intentions on their Baby Girl.

    I did end up in bed with a girl who I met at a wedding, but it took months, from exchanging numbers, to then dropping out of touch, to then hooking up again, to dating and then getting serious. You’d have to play Shout a billion times on a loop to track our first meet cute at the wedding to our mattress-drop.

    “Once I ended up in bed with the bride at a wedding, but we were married by then so nobody cared.”

    pegs, Laugh Of The Day:-)

    Thanks for that mate!

  20. I stand corrected, having finally looked at the correct talkback. But while the AICN thread has all the swears, misspellings and ad hominem attacks that an online community depends upon to grow and thrive, I prefer the discourse here at outlawvern.com.

    I was disappointed to see that Vern’s challenge to a talkbacker to re-evaluate the movie two years later in 2007 was not met. Conversely, I was amused by the guy who, after directing angry and violent rhetoric towards Vern, made the follow-up comment “I dont even know if I was kidding or not. At this point I am embarrassed to be alive. especially now that I have read the thread that I am on”

  21. Reading some of those old talkbacker names made me actually feel a bit nostalgic. I wonder what they are doing now and if the worst ones grew out of their angry keyboard warrior phase or only got worse.

    It’s crazy how harmless(-ish) the old AICN days feel compared to today. Sure, there were already some sick assholes back in the days, but it felt like we were all in a mutual, unspoken agreement there, if that makes any sense. It was like a battle rap contest. You went there to talk shit to others, but you knew that they would also talk shit to you, so it was all (more or less) good, despite getting incredibly frustrating at times. I guess having this vitriol confined to one website instead of having it spread all over social media helped. And you knew that certain lines would (normally) not be crossed there. For a place that had the reputation of being a cesspool of foul mouthed negativity, it didn’t feel like you would have to be worried about an army of fanboys doxxing you and putting you and your loved ones in serious danger in the offline world.

    Shit! The AICN talkbacks were the George W. Bush years to today’s social media Trump hell hole! We thought that DannyGloversDickBlood writing a hate manifesto against Seth Rogen, Sam Raimi suddenly being declared the worst director ever because SPIDEY 3 wasn’t as good as the first two or that one guy hating on TERMINATOR 2 by calling it “We wuv you Robodaddy” over and over was the lowest point, but little did we know that it would get much worse!

  22. I hear that @Curt though I’m disappointed about the lack of engagement compared to 5 or 6 years ago when a hit movie or nostalgic revisit would get more than 100 comments from dozens of visitors. I haven’t seen WEDDING CRASHERS in forever but I can’t recall a single laugh so just wanted to point out the real laughs I got from this flick came from that old Talkback 😃

  23. Where I would slightly side with Skani and our Ripe and/or Splatty overlords is that I think we were getting a bit lost in the weeds here about whether weddings are a great place to pick up women (they aren’t) or if it’s feasible to crash a wedding like this (it’s not, at least not as a matter of habbit). That’s a few steps up from pointing out that statistically Elmer would have successfully killed Bugs after a few tries. I even think the moral issues we have here (which I agree with, and in general I think a lot of comedies around this time were more insidious or at least disingenuous than their more overtly skivvy 70s/80s antecedents) would be something we would be willing to leave to just a side eye if we thought this was funny, or at least if it were funny for a couple of acts before descending into mediocre mush. But we don’t, so I stand on the side of the few, the proud, the measured-with-indisputable-accuracy 30% of us who stand on our little soap boxes and cry “Fuck WEDDING CRASHERS!!!”

    And the “legacy” section for this on Wikipedia is one of the grimmest things I’ve ever read. Adding a bro term to the lexicon *and* inspiring a Maroon5 video, dear lord.

    But even as a proud member of Team FWC seeing THE INTERNSHIP at a free preview screening made me sad in a special way, sad for them and for the world of my early adulthood slipping away.

    As an olive branch to the CRASHheads I will grant that this film did indeed start that 10 year or so period where R-Rated comedies were watched by paying adults in movie theatres after a few years of being almost exclusively the domain of teenage bedrooms, but I find it hard to think of any successful films that were inspired by this in terms of its plotting or jokes. (Although it was made with a PG-13 cut ready to go, making it kind of like the GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD of comedies) The film that set the tone would come later in the summer, even though it only made about half as much in the US (international was almost the same). But still it broke that ground, and winning is winning, doesn’t matter if it’s an inch or a mile.

  24. I don’t like Wedding Crashers at all, but I think some of your thoughtful takes on the douchey leads could be put in interesting conversation with this new Guardian retrospective on Step Brothers, Vern:

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jul/16/in-defence-of-step-brothers-will-ferrell-john-c-reilly-obama-era-comedy

    Ultimately those dumb dude protagonists are a bit more innocent to be sure, and Wedding Crashers of course pre-dates Obama. But still, an interesting analysis of a broader trend for both these films.

    Good stuff as ever,
    Ben

  25. I feel like it’s relevant to address the misogyny of this movie, but… is it me, or was the homophobia regarding that one character so off-the-charts as to be Martian back then? I don’t understand how that shit was EVER funny. Like, that is some weapons-grade hatred towards homosexuality in this movie (which stands in contrast to the following era’s Apatow-flavored playful “accepting” homophobia, i.e. “You know how I know you’re gay?”, etc)

  26. Ben – Yeah, I thought STEP BROTHERS was an interesting comparison because to me the difference is that we are laughing at the step brothers for being such exaggerated manchildren losers, while the crashers come off to me like wish fulfillment, like “oh yes when it comes down to it this is wrong but wasn’t it great while it lasted?” Of course, Ferrell himself plays a STEP BROTHERS type character as their mentor but it feels very out of place after all the work the movie has done to try to tell us Wilson’s character is actually a sweetheart who knows better and deserves love.

    But to be honest STEP BROTHERS was kind of too much for me when it first came out. I remember some of my friends flipping for it but I was a little more mixed because I think it made me uncomfortable spending a whole feature length movie in that mindset. I still prefer TALLADEGA NIGHTS but STEP BROTHERS has won me over through the magic of watching parts of it on cable over many years.

  27. Man I really thought that was going to be some powerful story about how WEDDING CRASHERS was there for someone at their lowest point, and we were all going to fell awful for trashing it.

  28. That’s great and all, Henry, but what I really want to know is about twelve years ago when you and your wife were first married, did a couple of scamps crash your wedding? And did they seduce any of the attendees. I saw this movie where it happened. I can’t remember the name, though.

  29. Makes sense, Vern!

    On a totally different note, my wife and I just saw the new Supes and really, really enjoyed it. Look forward to your thoughts!

  30. despite my unapologetic love for WEDDING CRASHERS, I never have seen THEN INTERNSHIP. It looked pretty grim — HOLMES AND WATSON and THE WATCH -adjacent. I haven’t seen any of those. Grim times. Honestly, I never really cared for TALLAGEDA NIGHTS and STEP BROTHERS that much either, thoug Ricky Bobby has its moments (the not knowing to do with his hands bit always gets me). But this one, ZOOLANDER, STARSKY & HUTCH, DODGEBALL, ANCHORMAN, OLD SCHOOL, and THE OTHER GUYS all hold up for me.

  31. STEP BROTHERS has always been in the same vein to me. I know it is beloved now but I remember seeing it opening weekend in a packed screening that was fairly silent and unresponsive. I’ve seen clips over the years and it feels like everyone sees something I can’t, because it just seems loud, and I don’t know what the joke is supposed to be. ANCHORMAN and RICKY BOBBY remain the peak.

  32. Without trying to explain what is funny and what is not, I guess it helps that the Adam McKay flicks (STEP BROTHERS, TALLADEGA, ANCHORMAN, etc) often went for more cartoony and at times downright surreal humor. The titular step brothers were such over the top manchildren, it didn’t matter if you sympathised with them or not, because they were ridiculous caricatures. No matter how straight the characters around them were, you instantly knew that this is not the real world.

    From what I could gather about WEDDING CRASHERS, this is not the case here.

  33. I guess which Ferrell/McKay joint is too much varies, I like STEP BROTHERS and for me TALLENDEGA NIGHTS is the one that is grating and hard to sit through. I know Vern has highlighted some of the canny and subversive ways it comments on Bush2.0 (no relation) era America and I appreciate that, but I just don’t think it’s funny, and some of it I find painfully unfunny.

    I don’t think they ever topped ANCHORMAN, honestly even WAKE UP RON BURGUNDY, the DTV movie made out of discarded scenes from ANCHORMAN, many of which were in the trailer and some of which look like they would have cost quite a bit of money to shoot but I wasn’t their accountant I guess, might be my second favourite. I did like the real ANCHORMAN 2, even if McKay’s didactic tendancies had already taken him over by the end of that film, so at least their partnership ended on a good note for me.

  34. I couldn’t make it five minutes into STEPBROTHERS. Saw ANCHORMAN once. Just clips from TALLADEGA NIGHTS. BUT I am the world’s one and only CASA DE MI PADRE man. I can take or leave (and mostly leave) everything else Gary Sanchez Productions ever made.

  35. There are at least two CASA DE MI PADRE fans and I am the other one.

    I kinda have to think of something that you once said about comedies in the 90s: Something like “Comedies weren’t allowed to be funny until BILLY MADISON came out” and this is how I feel about the Ferrell/McKay joints. I’m trying hard to think of any comedies from the 00s or 10s that I actually liked. By then even Sandler’s output became uneven (Everything from BILLY MADISON to DEEDS was great IMO), the Farrelly brothers peaked with SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and after ME, MYSELF AND IRENE became less funny with each movie (Shoutout to THREE STOOGES though), ROAD TRIP was fine, but Todd Philips didn’t exactly turn out to be a strong, unique voice in the comedy world. But when it starred Will Ferrell and was directed by Adam McKay, I could count on it being some damn funny shit.

  36. I was at a super low point in my life, having just moved to LA and not really knowing anyone, but Wedding Crashers came out and…

    Nah I’m playing.

    Im with Fred on this. Laughed my ass off and thought it was gonna be rewatched as mich as Anchorman and I haven’t seen it since theaters.

    Vern brings up a lot of valid points I didn’t consider on first watch, but I agree. I also want to say I think they sold the movie on the opening montage and then made a weird mixed-up farce in an estate movie, instead of a movie with more wedding crashing. Missed opportunity there.

  37. jojo: “If Animal House had a final act where Otter, Blutto, D-Day, and the gang realize the error of their ways…”

    That is Senator Blutarsky to you, sir!

    I did not like WEDDING CRASHERS because Vince Vaughan is a terribly limited comedic actor who never even tries to play a different character other than his own persona, and somehow he managed to con his goofy way into mattress flops with half the beautiful stars in Hollywood. So this movie hits a little too close to the truth for me, being a shy nerd who has always resented tall good looking obviously fake charmers.

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