Wedding Crashers
''Wedding Crashers," a salty and riotous new comedy, is the antidote to Hollywood's recent string of refried plots and allegorical disasters. Boldly, it embraces what too few big movies have this summer: fun. Some of you might recall how that feels: You enter the megaplex in anticipation, you leave in delight.
Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn star, respectively, as John Beckwith and Jeremy Klein, divorce mediators and untamed bachelors who spend their weekends combing the wedding circuit of the nation's capital, looking for women to bed. Their strategy was inherited some years ago from a great wedding-crashing guru. It consists of showing up at an event dashingly attired and prepared with a well-researched back story that loosely connects them to the bride or groom.
John and Jeremy might fake tears during the ceremony and get rip-roaring yet engagingly drunk at the reception, each zeroing in on the unsuspecting lass he cruised at the church. Amid all this, they charm fellow guests with inane toasts or, for the kids, balloon-animal tricks. Each man is shamelessly flattering in his own way, although John is smoother. During a slow dance, he tells one woman that the sweet nothing he just cooed to her is ''poetry -- by Sarah McLachlan."
Directed by David Dobkin from Steve Faber and Bob Fisher's script, ''Wedding Crashers" hits its stride in the first 20 minutes. The laughs come quick and easily. And after a blitz of weddings (Indian, Italian, Jewish), there's reason to worry that the movie's crack timing and deliberate comedic rhythms aren't meant to last.
Indeed, the movie seems to peak too soon in a rambunctious montage of reception and post-reception shenanigans edited by Mark Livolsi and backed by the Isley Brothers' ''Shout." Champagne explodes from a bottle, a girl takes a wholehearted swig, Wilson and Vaughn bounce up and down, girl collapses in ecstasy nude on a bed. Rinse and repeat.
As it happens, that's merely an energetic prelude. The movie's plot arrives with the nuptials of a senator's daughter, whose father is played by Christopher Walken and whose big day, Jeremy says, will be ''the Kentucky Derby of weddings." So away the boys crash, but not without complication. John falls fast for the senator's middle daughter Claire Cleary (Rachel McAdams), who's engaged to a macho WASP (Bradley Cooper). And Jeremy employs a fake-trauma trick called ''haunted past" to deflower the senator's manic youngest daughter, Gloria (Isla Fisher), who becomes wild and clingy with lust.
After his tryst, Jeremy wants to flee the premises. But John wants to pursue Claire, a flagrant violation of the wedding-crasher code. Nonetheless, when Claire, Gloria, and Senator Cleary invite John and Jeremy to weekend at their enormous Maryland estate, they comply. Sexual raunchiness follows. This includes Jane Seymour as Mrs. Robinson -- sorry, it's Mrs. Cleary -- who demands that John fondle her new breasts.
And yet, beneath the movie's freewheeling vulgarity, there's real heart and a tale of personal growth: John must win Claire from her fiance, not to conquer but to love her. Despite its inevitable outcome, the movie has a good time subverting what we've been trained to expect from the conclusion of a romantic comedy.
The ''Wedding Crashers" cast and crew never underestimate the art of simple entertainment. Dobkin is rather undistinguished as a moviemaker. (His previous film was ''Shanghai Knights," a draggy escapade with Wilson and Jackie Chan.) But here, he knows where to find the needles in the comedy haystack, even at the risk of some scenes crossing too far into farce, mostly where the Clearys' gay art-freak son is involved. (Although, honestly, he's no weirder than anyone else in the family.)
Dobkin also shows skill with the actors. Wilson and Vaughn are their usual selves, only more so. Wilson is typically unflappable, but he shows rare traces of actual feeling. And there's rock 'n' roll in Vaughn's rat-a-tat sarcasm. He and Wilson both look tired here, and the fatigue in their faces befits two men who need to slow down and grow up. They make a unique duo for comedy: There is no conventional straight man.
McAdams, with unflatteringly dark hair, is the calm in this rumpus. She provides a lovely reason for a man to forsake rakishness. But it's Fisher who makes the biggest impression. She looks like a teenage Ann-Margaret (she's 29) and is game for everything, fearlessly out-raunching her male co-stars. The character is just a nightmare fantasy, but it works because Fisher can find the fun-loving girl in the nutjob.
The movie has other virtues, too. At the Cleary's estate, ''Wedding Crashers" takes an unexpected turn into high-spirited, dirty-minded, physical restoration comedy. Here, the movie suggests what Billy Wilder might have tried with an R-rated ''Gatsby."
Of course, the movie's not as accomplished as a good Wilder picture, but what is? It's too long, too broad, and, at times, too slapdash. But even the hint of such an allusion is more pleasing than the string of movies currently aiming to satisfy our appetites for destruction. Tom Cruise might have saved his family from apocalypse. But Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn have just saved our summer.
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