I like thinking about what this film could have been

Rating: 5/10 (16 July 2005)

So this guy is a regular presence at weddings. He's entertains the guests and is well- received by everybody. He falls for a girl. The girl is with this other guy that has a lot going for him but just might be a total jackass. Now this guy has to attempt to woo an engaged girl in order for the film to have a happy ending. Sound familiar? Well the lead story line isn't the only thing that Wedding Crashers shares with 1998's The Wedding Singer. The best friend of the lead male has a potential love interest in the lead female's sister. Wedding Crashers even lifts Ellen Albertini Dow as a feisty old lady that likes to say things that old lady's just don't say. In many important ways Wedding Crashers is The Wedding Singer with Owen Wilson standing in for Adam Sandler and Vince Vaughn playing an enlarged version of Allen Covert's role. In perhaps the most unfortunate shared trait, it slaps a lazy script on a can't- miss comedy idea.
The film opens promisingly with John Beckwith and Jeremy Klein (Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn) hyped about the start of "wedding season", a time of year when they can hit weddings and find food, drinks and sex o'plenty from women in an emotionally- compromised state. Taking on guises to match the culture or ethnicity of the weddings they crash they eat, drink and screw their way through a series of receptions leading up to the wedding for a daughter of the Secretary of Treasury (Christopher Walken) and there the plot thickens...way too much. Dropping moments of brilliant hilarity over by-the-numbers romantic comedy schmaltz, Wilson falls hard for one of Secretary Clearly's other daughters Claire Cleary (Rachel McAdams). There's probably a lot of fun to be had in letting Wilson try to salvage a romance when his love interest knows his job, name, and life history, just not the real ones. However director David Dobkin (Shanghai Knights) carefully steers clear of most humorous areas to take the road well-traveled. There's even a montage of broken- hearted would-be lovers over a sad guitar song, ouch. Alas comes the inevitable confrontation at the altar where the script actually acknowledges the cliché out loud but refuses to seek shelter in self-parody.
Despite the crappy writing, just barely competent direction and being a good 25 minutes too long at 119 min., Wedding Crashers still generates enough goodwill to just about be worth seeing at a matinée price. The team of Christopher Walken, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are capable of mining humor out of the most dreadful material and they intermittently succeed at making the movie laugh-out-loud funny. There are great scenes between Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson that seem like they came from a different, much better film. McAdams and Wilson have chemistry enough to make the attraction easy to swallow and a memorable late-film cameo by Will Ferrell brings a burst of much-needed hilarity to one of the most painfully syrupy parts of the film.
Wedding Crashers is a film that in a way makes me think about last year's Manchurian Candidate. Though the original was a classic piece of fantastic paranoia, someone felt compelled to remake it anyway. Though the remake does justice to the original, it begs the question, why remake a great film? Why not remake a film that could have been great but wasn't? Here's hoping someone does that for Wedding Crashers in the future.