Smashing!

Rating: 7/10 (24 January 2006)

Wedding crashers, about two guys who invite themselves to weddings to hook up with women, is crude, filthy raunch. I loved it! There's nothing more beautiful and romantic than taking the maid of honor to bed during the reception. But I digress.
Thanks in no small part to the excellent on-screen chemistry of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, the movie is a few notches above typical lowest-common-denominator fare. Oh, let's be honest - Pride and Prejudice, this ain't. But in its own idiom, Wedding Crashers is just plain good laugh out loud comedy.
So this is what John (Wilson) and Jeremy (Vaughn) do. They get into their nice suits and crash weddings AND receptions. They cozy up to the hot guests, make balloon animals, dance, flirt, and eventually wind up with someone. And the next day or weekend, they do it again. Then one day John falls for his mark, Claire (Rachel McAdams), the daughter of the Treasury Secretary (Christopher Walken). Oops; in violation of all of their rules of wedding crashing, the boys spend the weekend with the secretary and his upper-crust family. Claire's engaged to be engaged to Sack, who's thoroughly obnoxious and creepy. You know, just in case you thought she'd have to really choose between him and John, who's, well, Owen Wilson.
Also thrown into the mix are Claire's younger sister Gloria, who has the hots for Jeremy - and who may or may not be a virgin; her brother Todd, a bitter, repressed artist; her mom, played by the usually prim Jane Seymour, who has the hots for Jeremy, too; a gramma, and a wise and all knowing butler. It's madcap mayhem, I tell you! Often, this type of chaotic, door-slamming comedy doesn't work in American films, but Wlson and Vaughn are talented enough to pull it off. And it helps that the movie is well written (by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher), with plenty of one liners and running gags.
Sure, it's a tad predictable (gee, do you think true love will win?), but who cares? It's loads of fun, with some fantastically hysterical scenes.