You know the drill: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. The Wedding Crashers is all that and more.

This film couldn't have started off with a better idea. Two thirty-something bachelors crash weddings - in part to mock the holy institution that turns the fun of romance into a sacred obligation - and in part to simply scam the vulnerable. As these guys see it, anybody dumb enough to get sappy about a fairy tale deserves what they get.

So it's a social statement - right? You know, a last act of defiance against the setting sun of youth? A pyrric trashing of hypocrisy? Misogeny dressed up as wit? Frat-boy sleaze with a sense of mission, as if it were John Brown on his way to Harper's Ferry?

Maybe. Maybe not. There are other, perhaps easier, ways to meet women - less dangerous places like supermarkets, laundromats, beaches and 12-step meetings. In truth, these guys may not have much respect for the institution of marriage, but they love wedding receptions. They dive right in like addicts. They don't just crash the party. They ARE the party.

But that's where the Winnebago breaks down.

Screenwriters, Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, have a winner on their hands, but they don't have the skill to tame this tiger. The story they've envisoned comes pregnant with possibility, but humor is all-too-often its bastard child, and what a wild child that! There are some hilarious set pieces strung together, along with some interesting development of theme - but from the very outset, Faber and Fisher get shackled to the story conventions of hacks they should have ignored.

On this one, I'm going to blame Fisher. For both men, this was their first-time feature, but Fisher was one of nine writers for the ABC TV series, "The Trouble with Normal," a 2000 sitcom that lasted one season. The ghosts of that story - about four paranoid guys who seek counseling - haunts this film at the worst moments, such as its first ten minutes, which feel like a TV show.

Instead of tight writing that uses mystery to spring one surprise after another, this one telegraphs nearly every plot point - sometimes twenty or thirty minutes in advance. Some of that is the formulaic, paint-by-numbers plot you could recite - or invent - in your sleep. Otherwise, it's the film's chattiness that awkwardly dumps every ounce of exposition into the film's beginning - and with all the sincerity of two people who know they're being recorded. That's a huge mistake - but one that's less a matter of inexperience than bad experience - such as writing for a failed TV sitcom.

Did I mention this one was on ABC, the synergistic play-toy of Disney?

When the film begins, we meet John Beckwith and Jeremy Grey (Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn) - two guys acting as mediators for a divorce. It's actually a funny scene, even if its whole purpose is to show us why these guys have so much disdain for the institution of marriage. It's what comes after - as Vaughn tells a woman (who wants to set him up) why he hates marriage - and in that chatty "speak into the bow-tie" meeting with Wilson, where John and Jeremy discuss what they're going to do (crash a series of weddings) and why - that the film hobbles out of the gate like a greyhound with a bad foot.

And unfortunately, it gets worse.

The next five or six minutes give us the perfunctory montage of weddings crashed, personas adopted, tricks used to reel women in, and naked - yes, naked - women screwing our heroes, again and again and again.

What the Hell?

In what must have been an unholy alliance between a pair of inexperienced scribes and director David Dobkin, who got his directorial start on the cable softporn, "Love Street," the filmmakers throw caution to the wind and grab that "R" by the tail - with shockingly stupid inserts of nudity and liberal uses of the F-bomb.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against either - when they make the story sizzle. But this is not an "R" film. It's a lite, slight, frat-pack comedy. Memento deserved an R. American Beauty deserved an R. For that matter, American Pie deserved an R. But this film is a cross between Shanghai Knights and A Night at the Roxbury.

I wonder what idiot thought it would improve this film to steer straight into that iceberg? Five will you get you ten, it was Vince Vaughn, himself. While his comedies with Ben Stiller have carefully navigated the straits of PG-13 - when left to his own devices, he tends to end up in R-rated comedies - and usually for the language. But if you're seducing women at weddings, where's the need to curse like a sailor? I guess we need special assurance that these guys are "cocksmen" - at least when they're by themselves. I guess the fact that they scam women at weddings isn't vivid enough. Owen Wilson, on the other hand, almost never pulls an R for a comedy - unless it's a comedy with heavier dramatic elements, like The Royal Tenenbaums.

Anyway, the first twenty minutes of this film are wasted on setups we don't need, background material that kills all the mystery and a perfunctory montage that gives us just about every joke in the trailer, but is otherwise pretty lame. But this is a movie that refuses to suck, even when groped by the fumbling fingers of first-timers.

First, the movie has tremendous energy. Wilson and Vaugn jump into this flick with an air of pure delight that's pretty much irresistible. There's also a whole sequence of slapstick routines surrounding Vaughn's character, Jeremy - because he's the most jaded and hateful of the two. Crashing the ultimate wedding - a gala affair involving father of the bride, U.S. Treasury Secretary Cleary (Christopher Walken) - two things happen. Owen falls in love with Claire Cleary (Rachel McAdams) and Vaughn begins the ultimate comeuppance: He cons, then gets stalked by, one of Cleary's other daughters, Gloria (Isla Fisher) - who comes at him with a look inspired by Kathie Bates in Misery.

Drawn to Claire (who ironically shares the same first name as the counselor in "The Trouble with Normal") - Wilson's character, John, presses for "overtime." That's bad news for Jeremy - who wants nothing more than to escape a textbook "clinger." In spending a day, a night and the next day with the Cleary family, John gets to continue the pursuit - while Jeremy takes one beating after the other.

And that's probably where this film got some of its best laughs.

It's a weird strategy to move the target - midway through the film - but this one does it, not once but twice. If the original joke was about how funny it would be to crash someone else's party, it later morphs into something else: how funny it would be to see a "player" humbled by his own game. Were this a buddy-comedy version of Alfie, we'd expect the goal-post-moving to stop there, but it doesn't. Instead, the film tries to set up a new object of derision - not silly women or jaded liars. Instead, it decides to reinvent the jerky boyfriend, Glenn Guglia (Matthew Glave) from the Wedding Singer.

Whenever you see a guy like this pop out of a story, you know why he's there. He's there for the same reason Sollozo, the Turk, shows up in the Godfather (reminding us that there are people out there far more evil than Vito Corleone). It takes a Gordon Gekko to redeem a Bud Fox. Of course, most marital choices in life are hardly binary. Coke may rot your teeth but that doesn't, in itself, explain why Pepsi is "the choice of a new generation." It's all so very simplistic and stupid.

And yet, in the midst of all this paint-by-number, bull-in-a-china-shop scriptwriting, there are some genuinely inspired performances. Walken has most of his edge worn off, going for a mildly foreboding presence that's easy to erode into a big Teddy Bear. Fisher is fantastic as the wacky sister who freaks Vaughn out. Vaughn and Wilson play off each other with an ease that works well.

Surprisingly so, Rachel McAdams has probably the most emotionally complicated job. She's the one who has to be both an object of desire and an engaging character. Even if the script eventually throws her into familiar territory, McAdams does a delightful job of playing a wedding skeptic who matches Wilson's reservations, while maintaining a similar low-key struggle between faith and doubt.

Despite its failings, I liked the ambition of this film, in terms of its attempt to do more than sell us another stupid comedy. While it couldn't find its way through the maze, it kept trying to develop a theme - maybe even an observation - about weddings, marriage, and the struggle between young bachelorhood and what may be a guy's version of the "biological clock."

The premise, itself, is based on the idea of an emotional divide between those who see marriage as a sacred institution, and a key to happiness - and those who "see through the hypocrisy" and consider it an end to the real joys of singlehood. It begins with an air of cynicism - as if what we're seeing is a black comedy - but later decides to come in out of the rain. When it does, it wallows in the cornball, the preachy and the obvious - but it does so self-consciously. It wants to tell us something I read somewhere - or maybe heard as happy banter in a TV sitcom: something about cheesy cliches and their enduring power.

Whether the message works depends on how willing you are to wish upon a star, see God's footprints as you walk along the beach or send that extra five dollars to Sally Struthers. If you can ignore the clunky telling, this is still a comedy with a lot of laughs. But whether you see the glass as half-empty or half-full will depend on how annoying you find it to watch novice screenwriters take a great premise and get out their cookie cutters.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age