Sorry, not very funny

Rating: 4/10 (9 August 2005)

I've noticed a trend in American comedies lately. The formula is thusly: you take some somewhat well-known, sometime comedic actors, give them an unfunny script, and then sit back and ask them to make us laugh. This happened in Meet the Fokkers, Guess Who, and most recently, Wedding Crashers.
I'm not saying Wedding Crashers is completely awful. In fact, of the three, it's probably the funniest. But so many times, as in the other two flicks, it sets up a scene or situation that simply doesn't deliver. In a scene of touch football, for example, Vince Vaughn is laid flat on his back by the dopey villain character. He can barely breathe; but nobody seems to notice. What's so funny about that? Is he really hurt? How badly? Or is he faking? Why? The situation lingers, so we expect something additional to happen, but it doesn't. I think the trick here is that the audience feels it is supposed to laugh, so some do, even though nothing funny is happening. And then the movie goes through the same exact routine again.
And then there is a scene where the same evil guy shoots an innocent Vaughn in the backside with a shotgun for no reason other than anger. The payoff? We see Vaughn having the shot removed from his bare butt. This is funny?
The subplot of the young gay relative is excruciatingly bad. The boy is miserable, but then he is used as a whimsical anti-gay plot device. There is nothing funny about homophobic comments about a suffering young man, evenor especially when they come out of the mouth of his doddering old grandmother. If this character had been over-the-top with a lisp and designer clothes and a supremely confident and cocky attitude, it could have been funny, for it would have been teasing his flamboyancy. But here it is just cruel.
Christopher Walken is completely wasted in his role. He merely reads his lines; his character could have been played by anybody. When he walks into a room where Vince Vaughn is tied up in bed, we wonder if he will have some sort of witty comment or go into a creepy Christopher Walken monologue about ropes? But for some reason, he does not see the ropes, which makes no sense at all. He sits on the bed, recites some lines, and leaves. Boring.
Rachel McAdams, on the other hand, chews the scenery in every scene she's in; I imagine her website might have crashed from all of the hits after WC opened. But she's the great one in an otherwise forgettable movie. Vaughn and Wilson have some good laughs early on, but from then on it's downhill. In a movie dealing with marriage, nothing is ever made of the fact that Vince Vaughn's love interest looks to be less than half his age. Jane Seymour's character places her into a Mrs. Robinson-styled situation with Wilson; but instead of Wilson's normal witty repartee, all he does is look scared, and the scene ends. Will Ferrell has a cameo that goes absolutely nowhere; when that situation became apparent, the director must have told him to start shouting obscenities in order to try to make it funny.
There is only so much one can do with a script and direction that don't deliver. You can't put people into odd situations and expect laughs unless you give them something funny to say or do. And having them yell or use dirty language does not help; instead, it smacks of desperation.