Wedding Crashers

A couple of swinging hip lawyers who look forward to wedding season every year because they like to crash them in order to hook up with all of the ladies swept up by the romance of the special days, fall upon one particular nuptial service during which each man is genuinely smitten by a woman standing by the sidelines, and both are invited to that family’s weekend getaway for more getting-to-know-me time. What ensues includes laughs, sexual situations and Vince Vaughn clocking it out of the stadium!!

There’s a day/game in every athlete’s career when they are referred to as being “in the zone”’; a place where everything they do just comes together, with every slapshot going into the net for a hockey player, every jumpshot swishing “nothing but net” in basketball and every swing of the racket turning into an ace or some shit like that in tennis. I bring up “the zone” in my review of this film because Vince Vaughn, one of the two lead actors in this movie, is completely “in the zone” here and can’t help but be as hilarious as he can be, with every word, every action and every look on his puffy face cracking my sorry ass up. I’ve always been a big fan of Vaughn’s, starting from his star-making turn in the awesome SWINGERS, but you can tell that he’s completely honed his game at this point of his career, delivering lines like nobody’s business and surely improvising many of them, as they sound just like Vaughn when he’s on fire during any of his regular talk show visits. Of course, Vaughn’s standout performance doesn’t diminish from everyone else, since the entire cast pretty much comes to play with Owen Wilson delivering a nice mix of character featuring both humor and tenderness, Rachel McAdams continuing to impress, looking amazing and coming through as the “love interest” and Isla Fisher stealing scenes as the film’s goofy “wild card”. The film itself also managed to outdo most movies coming out these days by impressively managing to meld “dirty comedy” with romance, friendship, drama and a handful of interesting characters – elements that are difficult enough to successfully implement across a number of movies, lest just the one.

Of course, nobody’s going to complain about Christopher Walken showing up in a movie or Jane Seymour acting the sex kitten, so I certainly won’t either, but ultimately the film totally works because it manages to be very funny, sexy, raunchy (F-bombs galore) and cute and sweet, all at the same time, and that sort of thing doesn’t happen every day. Granted, the film ran a little too long (although I was still quite interested all the way to the end), the weirdo gay brother didn’t really work for me, the Ferrell cameo wasn’t “all that” and the asshole fiancé in the film was just completely too one-dimensional and basically just an “asshole fiancé”, but those points really didn’t bother me all that much, especially since I was too busy cracking up at so many of the situations at hand, the machine-gunned one-liners delivered by Vaughn (“It’s time to get some strange ass”) and the realistic romance sparked between Wilson and McAdams. Oh, and before I forget, it’s also to note that not only was the romantic aspect of the film developed very well, but I really enjoyed the friendship aspect between the two lead guys as well. It’s not every day that a film pulls that off, especially without the million “gay jokes” squeezed in, but Vaughn and Wilson had a really sweet repartee going here, and ultimately sold me on their “love” for one another, which is yet another reason why the film works so well, on a variety of levels. Oh, and did I mention the T&A? You see, I didn’t even mention the T&A and the film still works! Great flick!! “Make me a bicycle, clown!”

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian