The makers of Wedding Crashers assembled every bit of talent needed to make a truly superior dark comedy. And even though it manages to entertain, it doesn't do it the way you expect it to and attracts the wrong audience to see it. It ends up being more romantic than it is dark and cuter than it is funny. That's not so bad except Wedding Crashers is meant to be a movie that makes us laugh. True, there are moments that are legitimately funny in this film, but there are too many wasted opportunities to make it an upper-echelon comedy.

Remember Meet Joe Black, one of the most frustrating movies of all time because the filmmakers had a great performance from Anthony Hopkins and no idea what to do with it ? At times, Wedding Crashers gave me the same sort of feeling. I found myself wishing that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson would just take over and leave that script in the dust.

Vaughn and Wilson play Jeremy and John, two seasoned veterans in the art of crashing weddings. They design their excursions and profile people with a level of precision that rivals gameplanning by NFL teams. They have figured which lines work on girls and even have gimmicks prepared in case something should go wrong. They need to do so. There is a part in the movie when Vince Vaughn's character has to work his way out of meeting a woman he slept with at another wedding.

At the beginning of the movie, we see a montage of the two crashing weddings of every possible ethnicity or religion, whether it be Italian, Jewish or Indian. And every time, they hit on babes that are as clueless as they are beautiful. They hit on bride's maids as well as single and married women. Their theory is that the dream of love forwarded by weddings is a powerful aphrodisiac.

One day, Jeremy comes up with a sizable task for the two. He wants to crash the club wedding of one of the daughters of Treasury Secretary Cleary, played by Christopher Walken. At first, John is skeptical but eventually gives in. As they arrive at the scene, they immediately spot the girls they intend to hunt. Jeremy immediately sets his sight on Gloria (Isla Fisher) while Claire (Rachel McAdams) grabs John's eyes and heart at first sight. The twist, which is so evident that it precedes the events of the film, is that during their seduction episodes, the two guys actually fall in love with the girls they are meant to simply have sex with.

After the wedding, John tries to engage discussions with Claire and eventually ends up having to dissert about politics with Cleary himself. Good thing these guys gameplan tightly ! Meanwhile, Jeremy scores with young Gloria on the beach.

For Gloria, Jeremy instantly becomes the love of her life, and she throws quite the fit trying to convince her father to invite the two wedding crashers to the after-wedding party at the family's shore house. After showing that's he's quite reluctant at the idea, Cleary finally gives in to his hysterical daughter, who looks like she's got the hormones of a 25-year old, but the mental age of five.

That's where the trouble begins for the movie. We are more thoroughly introduced to the villain of the movie, Claire's fiance Sack (what kind of name is that ?!), played by Bradley Cooper, and he's mean, really mean. That's one of the problems with the film. Only in a movie like Wedding Crashers can such a fundamentally unlikable guy hook up with a kind, lovely young woman like Rachel McAdams. In a true comedy, Office Space for example, the villain has to have something funny about him. Comedy villains you should love to hate, not hate them, period. Sack is so nasty, so cheap and so deceitful that all we want to do is to smash his face in with a sledgehammer. He is as appealing as your Nuclear Physics class at eight o'clock on Monday morning and has a dreadful sense of humor worthy of cinema's most unlikable characters. By the way, this should not be read as a criticism of Bradley Cooper's performance. If anything, he's very effective and a truly despicable villain. It's just that he'd be a much better fit in a movie like SWAT.

The film also underuses Christopher Walken. The guy can be very funny and yet, the film makes him into wallpaper. One key example of that is during the touch Football game that the guys have at the house. Walken barely says or does anything while we have to watch John and Claire chit-chatting and Jeremy having the bejesus beaten out of him by the vicious Sack, who's suspicious of the two newcomers and feels increasingly insecure about how friendly his fiancee and John are getting.

Vince Vaughn almost makes the movie into a legitimate comedy by himself. He and Wilson have great chemistry and comedic timing, but Vaughn's dead-pan reactions are extremely funny. Which leads us to another of the movie's problems. When he is with Vaughn, Owen Wilson makes us laugh. That is in part due to his partner. However, when I said that the movie is more romantic than it is dark, I was referring to Wilson, who is charming, but not necessarily funny. And the same thing goes for his other on-screen partner Rachel McAdams. She's adorable through her innate ability to appear fragile not to mention her considerable beauty. She and Wilson have a handful of lovely scenes together. This being said, she won't pluck laughs out of you.

Isla Fisher's character has more potential to provoke humor, but she is terribly underused in the movie. There is also Cleary's deranged and almost forsaken son Todd, played by Keir O'Donnell. The movie starts something with him and then forgets about him. The film also features a special guest star as Chaz, Jeremy's mentor, who's moved on to crashing funerals instead of weddings. Unfortunately, Chaz has about 30 seconds of relevant dialogue.

In the end, Wedding Crashers is far from being a bad film. It's cute, it's lovable and you root for the good guys and hate the bad guy in a major way. However, this movie is guilty of false representation. It does have its dark and stupendously vulgar moments, but it has too many elements of a romantic comedy to be a dark comedy. If only the people at the helm had known what to do with the cast's tremendous potential, they easily could have pulled off what they wanted to do in the first place.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age