With Good Luck Chuck just around the bend, and making such a desperately naked play to position itself as the next Wedding Crashers, I figured it's time to re-post a slightly redacted version of that film's original review, originally published in Screen International upon its theatrical release in 2005. To wit:



Much is made of the recent ascension of a number of actors — including Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Jack Black and Owen Wilson — who, informally dubbed the "Frat Pack," have paired in various combinations on a number of studio comedy features. With the popularity of teen ensemble pics waning and Jim Carrey remaining devoted to counterbalancing comedic broadsides with dramatic forays, Hollywood has been in serious need of a bankable humor infusion. They can call off the search. It's Vaughn and Wilson who headline Wedding Crashers, and the pair deliver a bada-bing smash. A charismatic and indefatigable romp that strikes just the right balance between well-sketched rudeness and sweetness, the movie stands poised to dominate the summer comedy sweepstakes.

The story centers on John Beckwith (Wilson) and Jeremy Grey (Vaughn), two Washington D.C. divorce mediators who get their off-time kicks posing as brothers or friends and hopping from nuptial to nuptial. There, they enjoy the free catering, alcohol and, naturally, love-hungry single women, sweeping the latter off their feet and into bed. Things change when the guys crash the marriage ceremony of the oldest daughter of Secretary of the Treasury William Cleary (Christopher Walken). John falls hard, fast and sincere for youngest daughter Claire (Rachel McAdams), leaving Jeremy to cope with the amorous advances of Gloria (Isla Fisher), an unleashed stallion of sexual rapaciousness and serial nuttiness. John's would-be relationship with Claire is complicated by several obstacles, not the least of which is of course his phony identity. There's also Claire's preppy jock boyfriend, Sack Lodge (Bradley Cooper).

Writers Steve Faber and Bob Fisher devise a number of clever ways to extend the joke of Wedding Crashers beyond the mere hit-and-run pleasures their characters derive, from having John and Jeremy bet on quoted scripture and ceremonial music (Johan Pachelbel's Canon in D, Richard Wagner's Wedding March Processional, etc.) to having them bound together by a leave-no-crasher-behind credo with all sorts of other rider attachments that eventually leads to a cameo by fellow Frat Pack member Ferrell as Chazz, the sort of mystical patriarch of this culture of uninvited party-hopping. The writers are careful, too, to paint John and Jeremy as impish advantage-takers who have a perhaps misguided but nonetheless abiding love of weddings (and thus romance). This may seem on the surface like bet-hedging, but it actually works better since the duo's prevarications are neither outlandish nor over-the-top. There are real characters here, and the laughs come from the absurd over-commitment to them, as well as some solid joke writing.

Director David Dobkin does a very good job of blending the film's disparate comedic styles, and while Wedding Crashers generally oversells the smarmy loathsomeness of Sack (making sure to paint him as a philandering letch so as not to retain any possible vestige of audience sympathy), the Cleary clan — a nice admixture of Kennedy and Bush lore and speculation — provides a suitably rich backdrop against which John and Jeremy can spin their wheels. The cast all have a blast and, again, Wilson and Vaughn deliver fashionably winning performances. But it's Fisher who achieves breakout clarity with her portrayal of the borderline bipolar Gloria. In a world of demure or artificially amusing straightwomen, she's not afraid to play gleefully unhinged. For the only slightly longer original review, from Screen International, click here.