Wedding Crashers Movie Review

Wedding Crashers

Movie Review

Wedding Crashers is the film that shifted the adult comedy paradigm. Before it was released industry hacks were convinced that adult comedies couldn't do numbers in the upper echelons. Wedding Crashers took in $285,000,000 worldwide during its big screen run, and is a major part of the reason why films like The Hangover are getting made.

The outline is one that could fit onto the back of a postage stamp, or be displayed on a grain of rice, such is it's simplicity. Friends John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughan) are wedding crashers. Thats not a Cronenburg-type sexual fetish which demands they drive their cars into wedding receptions and have sex in the ensuing carnage. Rather they turn up uninvited to weddings and, using a combination of bravado and research into the wedding party, bluff their way in. All is going swimmingly until they attend the nuptials of the daughter of US Treasury Secretary William Cleary (played by Christopher Walken). In the act of trying to sleep with the bride's two remaining sisters, the boys endear themselves to the family a little too well, and are invited to the post-reception get together at the family home. By this stage John is falling in love with Claire Cleary (Rachel McAdams) and Jeremy is falling decidedly out of lust with her sister Gloria (Isla Fisher in a career-making role). The two feuding friends must wend their way through a minefield of inappropriate grandmothers, creepy brothers and dangerous fiances if they're both to get what they want from this particular crash.

Wedding Crashers is in my top five films of the last five years. There, I said it (or to be more accurate, wrote it). Not The Squid and the Whale, not Dark Knight, not most of the multitude of equally deserving high concept movies put to market in the last half decade. An adult oriented, sometimes - well, if truth be told, mostly - crude comedy ranks in the highest percentile of films I have viewed since 2004. And the biggest reason why is because it is infinitely watchable.

The term Desert Island Discs is thrown around all too much when it comes to music, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent for film. Never is an interviewed director asked to imagine themselves as a castaway on part of a remote archipelago, with nothing but time to kill and a small selection of movies to watch; his Desert Island Digital Versatile Discs if you will. What would he choose, and what would be the criteria for those choices?

It is my opinion that one criterion should be that any film chosen should be capable of being viewed multiple times without self-induced hair loss. Its all very well to say that you like, for instance, last year's Aronofsky classic The Wrestler, but that's really a once-every-five-years movie at most. Any more than that will require a trip to the pharmacy to fill a prescription for some powerful anti-depressants.

Some directors consistently produce films that are endlessly watchable. Stanley Kubrick was one such man. On average I watch a Kubrick film once every six to nine months, that timeline only being elongated by the fact that his films don't regularly pop up on TV; not regularly enough anyway. While I no longer think that a string of Kubrickian gold will flow from David Dobkin's directors chair (2007's Fred Claus put paid to that fantasy), I do think that he – along with newcomer screenwriters Steve Faber and Bob Fisher – have accomplished something that most filmmakers never do in crafting a movie which I take time out to watch every time it appears on TV. Add to that the fact that its repeatedly being pulled from my DVD collection and I must have seen it at least fifteen times in the last four years.

Why? Well, the story for starters. Faber and Fisher have plotted a cleverly coarse tale of two crashers, featuring well realised – if a little unsubtle - characters, a killer plot, and machine-gun dialogue packed with the same level of quotable gems as a Golden Era Simpsons episode. A film's IMDb quotes page doesn't get to be this long by pure chance. Whats more, the popularisation of the verb “Motor Boat”, at least in my mind, can be traced directly back to this flick, and praise doesn't come much higher than when a movie manages to insert a new phrase – however boorish - into the public consciousness.

The wonderful cast features three frat pack alumni; Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughan and a cameo by Will Ferrell. While both Wilson and Ferrell have their moments this is Vince Vaughan's movie. He doesn't really stand out from surrounding performances during the first act. The reason for this is that his character is on the same page as Wilson's. However, once his fellow crasher starts demanding extra time with his quarry, and unsuspectingly dropping his buddy into some compromising situations in the process, Vaughan's quick-fire sarcastically disgruntled delivery comes good and the second act winds up being the best of the three.

If you still hanker for more, then this Commandment-like crasher's rulebook makes good reading. Meanwhile, one thinks one shall retire to the island TV cave with a dry martini, a copy of the movie, and a book on outboard engines.

9/10