Utter Dreck

Rating: 3/10 (26 July 2005)

I suppose it's a sign of age, but 15mins into this I started thinking how much better it would have been with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in the Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson roles. That would have been a funny film. Or, in modern day terms, maybe the guys from Friends, Chandler and Joey, or Ross as the more neurotic one. Ironically, Wedding Crashers would then simply have been branded as 'not as funny as Friends'. And it isn't.
Vaughn and Wilson are simply too old for this skit. It's creepy. They're past 35 easy, and not a young 35. Vaughn is quite heavy, which ages him, Wilson has crows' feet around his eyes. In a bad light they could pass for 50. Yet they're seducing young, vulnerable gals at weddings. This sleazy behaviour is only forgivable if a) They're a lot younger, and it's irrepressible folly of youth set to encounter a learning curve. b) They're really good looking, so the gals implicitly get more out of it - it works as a fantasy thing for them. c) They're marked out as bad guys from the start, and you know they're riding for a fall, and kind of look forward to it gleefully.
Instead, they're like weird guys in an office you catch doing something wrong, and you think, hmmm, I don't want to hang around these two.
Mild spoilers. It seems wrong to warn of spoilers when the writers seem so keen on spoiling the film themselves. Naturally there's no logic in the comedy, others have pointed this out. Jane Seymour is a nympho, but then suddenly isn't and that isn't referenced again. The senator's daughter is a shy, mad virgin, but then she turns out to be a nympho too. Vince Vaughn thinks she's mad, but then unaccountably thinks he has 'feelings' for her. The gratuitous sex works well, especially near the beginning, but it sits oddly with the tone of the film, it brings home how these creeps just use and abuse girls, and we're meant to approve. A Curtis Lemmon film would have suggested it, and it wouldn't be raunchy, and you'd get the idea, but you could skirt around their reprehensible behaviour.
Ultimately the two leads just don't have the charm and the film really gets worse as it goes on. The final scenes involving funeral crashing are in horrible taste, and not in a good way.
The whole film is like sitting through an awful best man's speech where he thinks he's being funny but it's just tacky and cringey.