Wedding Crashers

The simplest way to convey my opinion of Wedding Crashers is this: after it was over, I was asking myself why I spent two hours of my life watching it. It's hard to be too picky when you don't have to pay, but it was really that bad. There were about 2-3 jokes in it that I could laugh at without feeling guilty.

This movie couldn't decide if it was going to be American Pie or just your typical romantic comedy, tried to do both, and failed at both.

See, it couldn't go the American Pie route successfully because one of the major appeals of Pie was that you sympathize with the main character Jim. It's a raunchy sex comedy, but in the end you like the movie because of your sympathy for Jim; there are real emotions (the character's and the audience's)involved in his embarassing sexual experiences, so in the end the audience is left with more than just something to laugh at. So embarassment was a key part of the comedy in Pie that just never made an appearance in Wedding Crashers. Plus, I did not find either character, Vince Vaughn's Jeremy nor Owen Wilson's John, sympathetic in the least. They are a couple of scumbags who go to weddings to get women to sleep with them. They don't deserve for things to work out for them in the end. So unlike Pie, where you root for Jim at least a little bit, these are not guys to root for. American Pie this was not, though I had the very strong impression it was trying to be.

Nor did it work as a romantic comedy, and for a lot of the same reasons. I kind of liked the female character that Owen Wilson's character falls in love with precisely because she's not a stereotypical romantic comedy female. At her sister's wedding, she is practically killing herself to keep from laughing at the cheesiness that is her sister's wedding vows. This was early in the movie, actually, and I kind of had high hopes for Wedding Crashers at this point. I would say that her character, up until the last 20 minutes or so of the movie, is one of the two redeeming qualities of the movie (the other being Christopher Walken, whose mere presence makes me regret spending time watching this movie just a little less, though I still would never pay money to see this movie). But all those things that made her character interesting and different at the beginning of the film eventually fade so that she becomes just another cliched romantic comedy female who is pissed off that she was lied to but eventually is convinced to give the guy a second chance.

The plot of this movie pretty much follows the standard romantic comedy plot outline, but its failed attempts to be American Pie keep it from working in the end, since that kind of humor doesn't really work in a romantic comedy, especially that kind of humor done badly.

Vince Vaughn, I'm so disappointed in you.