Childish. Juvenile. Pathetic. (not my words)

Rating: 3/10 (19 August 2005)

The storytelling killed this one for me. Yes, we know they are divorce mediators after several minutes of mundane dialog hammering that out. We know they crash weddings after letting us visit too many of them. And the way the senator's family part, taking up the largest part of the story, ends is predictable to the extreme. For a comedy clocking in at almost 2 hours there's not enough arc in the story, so we have to rely on the script at a basic level, which contains some funny lines, but more not-so-funny ones. We then still have the comedy skills of Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn and later Will Ferrell to make this work, but they have the comedy talents of an average stand-up comedian, not able to make a feature-length movie very interesting. There were almost no laughs in the audience, the only character and actress that fitted the screwball here was Gloria (Isla Fisher), in an amusing over-the-top performance.
As marriage is presented here as a lie, they crash weddings to profit from that lie (after all they are divorce mediators being confronted by that lie everyday). As death is not a lie, John suddenly sees the light here. It is therefore a rather strange turn to let this end in two marriages, and then crash weddings again, although it is in the romcom-handbook. But that is the level of stupidity in the script that made this such an uninteresting comedy.