Deceptively unoriginal

Rating: 7/10 (21 March 2008)

The originality of 'Wedding Crashers' is conveyed by its title: a pair of young men gatecrash weddings (always full of strangers, so two more can easily pass unnoticed) in order to seduce women. But behind this premise, there's a plot that is a conventional replicate of a thousand other romantic comedies: everyone is beautiful, the class divide falls between the wealthy and the super-rich, sex is great but love is better, homosexuality is innately funny, the hero falls for the prettiest girl (in this case, the lovely Rachel McAdams) who rejects him in favour of her own wretched boyfriend owing to a misunderstanding but forgives him when he proves how much he loves her... a story both utterly unoriginal, and utterly unreal as well. So how much you like this film will probably depend mainly on how much you like its odd couple pairing of Vince Vaughn and Owne Wilson, both cast very much to type. Personally, I found the vision of unreconstructed maleness they projected a bit tiresome, not because of the characters in themselves, but because of the way they represent some kind of approved vision of how men are meant to be. There isn't any real insight into the innate nature of either sex here, to be frank; there are some laughs, but there are also times when you long for the film to go somewhere other than where you expect; and if that's how you feel, you'll still be longing when the credits roll by.