True Love, So Elusive.

Rating: 7/10 (24 March 2015)

Doesn't sound too promising, does it? Two aging adolescents -- Vincent Vaughan and Owen Wilson -- plan to crash lots of wedding in order to score.
They'll introduce themselves as distant family members with adventurous but tragic pasts. They'll invent tales of their achievements. They'll wear Purple Hearts to the events. And it works. They stuff themselves on cake, oysters, and champagne and the beautiful girls are all over them. They dance to a hora at Jewish weddings. At Irish weddings, they present themselves this way, "My name is Sean O'Ryan and I want to get drunk."
Then the inevitable happens. They crash the wedding party attended by the Secretary of State. (John McCain and James Carville do a cameo.) The Secretary is Christopher Walken and he has two gorgeous young daughters. Vaughan falls for the maniacal nympho, who is half his height and given to S/M. Wilson falls for the sensible Rachel McAdams, although she is already engaged to a snooty ex-preppy. It all works out. That's why this can be called a romantic comedy.
Actually, the first half of the movie is pretty funny. Yes, the whole shtick is out of one of those raunchy teen-aged comedies, but these guys are funny.
Vincent Vaughan is a tall, beefy loudmouth who seems to have trouble with comedy, although he's got some good lines. He's great as a cheerful villain, as he was in "Clay Pigeons," but light-heartedness almost defeats him and there's a speed bump whenever he has a scene.
Owen Wilson, on the other hand, is good at light comedy. It's hard to imagine his doing anything else. When I first saw him on screen I didn't like him because he resembled Robert Redford, whom I loathe for being more handsome than I, but Wilson grows on you. You get to find that uneven nose endearing. It wanders down the center of his face, an archipelago of flesh.
Christopher Walken is immediately funny. He can't help it. Even in dramatic parts, those wondering eyes, that curious gargle of a New York voice, conjure up the conviction that he thinks being in a movie is absurd, that EVERYTHING is absurd. Maybe he OD'd on Sartre in his youth. He'd be funny as King Lear.
The guru behind this wedding-crashing business is Will Ferrell. I wish he were funny because he tries so hard, but maybe that's the problem, in addition to his chthonic visage. By the end, he's given up crashing weddings and now crashes funerals. He's not as funny as the doddering old mother he sponges off, the tiny lady who suddenly belows, "Chazz! It's a friend of yours! Get the f*** down here -- and put away your skateboard!"
The "girls" are as good as the boys. Better even, because both Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher are pretty girls. Fisher, as Walken's younger daughter, whacks off Vaughan under the table at the family dinner and leaves him tied up at night so that the family's creepy homosexual son can have a go at him. There is a rich hint of lunacy in her squint.
Rachel McAdams is revoltingly cute. She could have been drawn by a cartoonist. Every singular feature is in its rightful place and her bottom wriggles deliciously when she walks.
I got a kick out of it until it bogged down in its second half, when it got a little maudlin about true love being the awareness of one soul of a corresponding resonance in another soul or some such nonsense. Still, some of the lines show that a bit of thought went into them. "He's so dumb he thinks Moby Dick is a venereal disease."