Wedding Crashers review

Just the idea of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson teaming up in a comedy about a pair of scoundrels who crash weddings to get laid is enough to bring a smile to the face. Both have proved great partners in comic duos and have worked together before in Starsky And Hutch and Zoolander, but more than that, the combination of the layback Wilson and the permanently wired Vaughn appears a match made in humour heaven. The two stars certainly share a good chemistry but while Wedding Crashers enjoys plenty of funny moments, the outcome is not quite as divine as was anticipated.

Director David Dobkin, who worked with Wilson in Shanghai Knights and Vaughn in Clay Pigeons, plays to the strengths of his two stars, but would have been better served by taking a firmer hand in the editing room. At nearly two hours long, even these affable Wedding Crashers begin to outstay their welcome. It's rare for the opening scene of a film to be completely superfluous, but that's the case here as things take their time to get rolling. And what the montage sequence that condenses the pair's wedding crashing MO lacks in humour it makes up for in length. The gratuitous nudity presumably was thrown in to keep attention from drifting.

Once things get moving though, and Vaughn launches into one of his trademark high speed rants, these indiscretions are forgotten. Vaughn plays Jeremy Klein who has for twelve years, along with his best friend John Beckwith (Wilson), lived for that brief annual period known in East Coast social circles as the wedding season. It is then that the two womanizers go hunting. Planned like a military exercise, the pair do their background research before turning up uninvited to the most promising looking events. It's been a fruitful tactic. "We've been to a million weddings and rocked them all," reflects John.

Just as John begins to question the dignity of their longtime practice - "Do you think we're being a little sleazy?" - Jeremy convinces him to postpone retirement until after "The Kentucky Derby of Weddings" involving the daughter of Treasury Secretary Cleary (Christopher Walken). It's there that John becomes smitten by one of Cleary's other daughters Claire (Rachel McAdams) while yet another daughter Gloria (Isla Fisher) takes a shine to Jeremy. Trying to conceal their true identities and motives from the girls and their prominent hosts proves to be only one of John and Jeremy's problems which include the amorous attentions of Cleary's wife (Jane Seymour), and the fact that Claire is engaged.

When Wilson and Vaughn are in full flow, their exchanges are hilarious and touched with an underlying warmth. Only occasionally do things veer off into the realms of sheer farce, most notably in one dinner table scene and with the arrival of Will Ferrell in a cameo. With laughs, tears, romance and a tendency to go on too long, Wedding Crashers is very much like a wedding, the only difference being most weddings don't have such entertaining crashers.

Kevin Murphy