Wedding Crashers Review

For about seventy minutes this is close to a perfect studio comedy. Vaughn and Wilson play the double act as a genuine friendship rather than a premise, Vaughn talking in unbroken paragraphs while Wilson underplays everything, and the opening montage of crashed receptions is the most efficient comic exposition of its era. Christopher Walken gives the Secretary a real interior life instead of playing him as an obstacle, which is why the film's stakes land at all, and Isla Fisher commits so completely to a character written as a warning that she turns her into the funniest thing in the picture.

Rachel McAdams is asked to be the sane one and is very good at it. Then the third act arrives and the film loses its nerve. It separates the two leads, sends one into a montage of moping, and resolves the whole thing with a chase and a speech it has not earned, as though someone decided a comedy this loose needed to prove it was also a romance. What was anarchic becomes obedient. The first two thirds are quotable a generation later; the last third is the reason it is a B and not an A.