Wedding Crashers

My young 23-year-old friend told me about Wedding Crashers when he caught it in the movie. "It was the perfect film. Until they ruined it by making it a romantic comedy." He was right.

At last, an original idea in Hollywood! Two 30-ish year old guys who are marriage mediators by day become wedding crashers during the summer months in high hopes of scoring with the bridesmaids at weddings, women who hope they'll be next.

John Beckwith: Hey, listen. What angle are you going to play here?
Jeremy Grey: I am going to go with the balloon animal display. For the kids. And then when she comes near, guess who is the broken man, haunted past? How about you?
John: I am going to go dance with the little flower girl. Oh, and I might be a charter member of Oprah's book club.
Jeremy: It's all deadly.

Great dialogue, funny scene-after-scene as these two lotharios who will stop at nothing hop from wedding to wedding, Jewish under-the-chupah to Chinese ceremony. It is an amazingly funny sequence.

And then the unspeakable happens. The writers introduce a plot. Guy meets girl, guy never got girl, guy wants girl. You know where this is going. And so the pace of the movie starts to crawl as our guys stop crashing weddings.

The second half doesn't nearly have the payoff that the first half promised, but it's still fairly funny even with the slower pace. And all of that is due to Vince Vaughn. Vaughn finally finds a role that is his mettle, a star-creating role. Vince IS wedding crasher Jeremy Grey. While we all recognize Owen Wilson as the pretty boy blond guy, he is no match for Vaughn's quick quipping Jeremy. This is a buddy film, but only one buddy is worth watching.

Original plot, snappy dialogue, and Vince Vaughn. Rent the DVD. Thumb's up.