I'm ready to "Crash" this party

Rating: 7/10 (8 August 2005)

Wedding Crashers is a throwback to comedy films that haven't been made with any regularity since the early 1980s: the sex comedy. I'm not referring to films full of innuendo or double entendres, but full on nudity and the raw language and outrageousness to back it up. For the most part, Wedding Crashers succeeds at creating a fun and funny romp, but it falls a little shy of being consistently hilarious.
Wedding Crashers is the story of John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughan), two mediators who spend every spring season crashing weddings together to pick up girls and have sex with them. These guys are two slick professionals who have been at this a long time and know all the ins and outs of Wedding Crashing: what to say, who to claim you are related to, what kind of spectacle to put on to get yourself in with the susceptible ladies. Jeremy discovers that upcoming is a major wedding for one of the daughters of Secretary of the Treasury Cleary (Christopher Walken). It is while crashing this wedding that John finds himself falling for one of the available daughters, Claire (Rachael McAdams), while Jeremy sets his sights on the other daughter, Gloria (Isla Fisher), who turns into what Jeremy describes as a "stage-5 clinger" which basically means she has developed an infatuation for him that he is not interested in. When Gloria invites them back to the family grounds for a weekend of fun, John is determined to get Claire away from her uber-competitive and arrogant boyfriend Zach (Bradley Cooper) and describe his love to her.
Wedding Crashers is a film where most of the humor revolves around placing John and Jeremy in situations that force them to concoct elaborate lies and stories to keep themselves from being found out. Most of the film's best humor comes from Vince Vaughan, who is constantly playing fall guy to John's straight guy. Vince Vaughan is attacked by Zach during a family touch football game, sexually drained by Gloria in situations that rapidly explode in outrageousness, as well as the unwanted sexual advances of the Cleary son Todd (Keir O'Donnell), who is homosexual. Vaughan does a great job of portraying a man who's fun weekend of sexual debauchery is quickly descending into a nightmare. His terrifically cynical delivery is also perfect for the part.
Wilson on the other hand is given the role of the man who is growing tired of the endless strings of one-night stands and is looking for something more permanent. Wedding Crashers has a serious side to it, with the romantic angle of John and Claire discovering and exploring their mutual attraction. Wilson is capable in the part, but he doesn't make quite the impression Vaughan does after the film's early scenes. He has the somewhat thankless role of playing the straight man in a raunchy sex comedy when some of the audience is undoubtedly looking for more laughs instead of a growing serious streak to film.
On the female side of the equation, both Rachael McAdams and Isla Fisher are standouts. McAdams, who I had not seen in a film previously, has a great, easy charm and atmosphere about her that seems enormously genuine. She has a great smile and her line delivery doesn't feel the least bit forced or stock. She is a natural actress and I would love to see her in more films in the future. Fisher is also enormously memorable for her borderline insane Gloria. She plays the role of sexually awakened and starved Gloria with such verve as to believe it. Her scenes are a bit over-the-top, but they provide the film with some of it's best humor.
As mentioned previously, the film does meander into a more serious story towards the end and the humor drops off noticeably. This is a trend that has become common in many comedies in recent years, and I wish it would start subsiding. I don't mind serious films, but when I walk into a comedy, I am ready to laugh, and straight subplots that hijack the film have become all the more frequent and unnecessary. Bring me the unending humor any day.
Even so, Wedding Crashers is funny enough when it is funny as to garner a recommendation, and it is also good to see a film not afraid to push some limits that used to not be commonplace. If you are looking for a good laugh, Wedding Crashers is worth checking out.