Richard Crouse

Wedding Crashers is a comedy of manners—bad manners that is. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn make their living as smooth talking mediators in difficult divorce cases. The side effect of this is that they are really good at talking malarkey to get people to do what they want—especially women. This dovetails nicely with their sideline of crashing weddings and using their charm to score food, drinks and bridesmaids who they say “throw their inhibitions to the wind” at marriage ceremonies. For these guys wedding crashing is more than just a hobby, it is a way of life with a strict set of rules, one of which says that they must never fall in love with any of their conquests. Of course, both break the rule—Vaughn hooks up with the slightly psychotic daughter of a well connected politician and Wilson with her beautiful sister, played by Canadian Rachel McAdams. Much of the success of Wedding Crashers is due to the chemistry between Vaughn and Wilson, who keep things cruising along at a good clip with snappy dialogue—much of which seems improvised—and their considerable charms. Neither are stretching as actors here—we’ve seen Vaughn’s manic motor mouth routine in a few films recently, and Wilson isn’t displaying any of the acting muscle he did in The Royal Tenenbaums—but audiences won’t care because although the film has some pacing problems, little comic momentum and is fairly predictable, but it does have enough funny lines to be enjoyable.