Wedding Crashers (2005)
Starring: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Christopher Walken, Rachel McAdams, Will Ferrell
Rating: 4/5
Reviewed by John Frankel of www.moviesforguys.com
I didn't go into this movie expecting much, but Wedding Crashers may just be the sleeper hit of the summer.
John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) make their living as mediators in difficult divorce cases. When the spouses are yelling at each other about who gets the frequent flyer miles, these two manage to talk some sense into them and get the case resolved. The side effect of this is that they are really good at talking utter crap to get people to do what they want, especially women. This fits in perfectly with their hobby of crashing weddings.
Where most guys see weddings as horribly boring events that require us to change into clean socks, John and Jeremy see an opportunity to score free food and drinks. They also score a little something extra with the bridesmaids who have themselves all worked up over the ceremony. While I still couldn't put up with the clean socks, I can certainly understand the lure of free... stuff.
Things are going great, the boys are scoring and having a great time until John falls for one of the bridesmaids. Now here's where I expected the movie to turn into a chick-flick, I'd start yawning and just count the minutes till the inevitable happy ending. Surprisingly enough, that didn't happen. Instead the writers ramped up the humor even more (and I'd been laughing out loud quite a bit up till this point) and kept the romance down to a tolerable level.
All the expected romantic-comedy queues are here... getting the family to like you, telling the girl you lied, getting into a fight with your best friend, and so on, but it's done so well that I just didn't care. I could run through a really long list but that would end up giving away the entire plot, but just think to yourself about the various possibilities that could happen when 2 guys hook up with sisters (one of which is a bit nuts) and go off for a weekend with the whole family that consists of a powerful dad, a horny wife, a jealous boyfriend and a gay brother. Most of what you just thought of is in the movie.
It did slow down some near the end as they had to wrap up the romantic stuff for the ladies, and as funny as the wedding crashes were, we did see a lot of them for the first hour of the movie. In the end the movie was just a bit too slow to get a 5 star rating, but it easily earned 4. Trim off 15 minutes worth and it might have been perfect.
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