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Printer-Friendly ModeVaughn 'crashes' onto 'A-list'
July 19, 2005 —
Every summer, there is at least one comedy destined to become a cult classic. Last summer, it was Anchorman and Dodgeball; two years ago, Old School made everyone feel like streaking to the quad.
Wedding Crashers is destined to fall into this category, for one simple reason: Vince Vaughn. Just like the previously mentioned movies, Vaughn steals the show again with a hilarious performance. If 2004 was the year of Ron Burgundy, 2005 will be the year of Jeremy Klein – Vaughn's jaded, love-leery character. It will also likely be a year where many brave single men try to emulate the antics of the on-stage team by crashing weddings of their own.
Teamed up with Owen Wilson (John Beckwith), the Washington, D.C. divorce mediators talk, charm, and deceive their way into the beds of many ladies through a universal meeting point – weddings. Wilson and Vaughn approach each wedding with a different game plan – and a different persona. At one wedding, the duo may play emotional Jewish males; at another, they're simply Irish lads looking to get drunk and bag some lasses in the process.
Being a wedding crasher means that your most precious skill is the ability to maintain your true identity, and to keep the relationships on the one-night stand level. Naturally, there is a twist, and it comes by crashing the wedding of an important politicians' daughter. For the first time, Wilson and Vaughn may have met their match in the brides' sisters, one of whom is all but engaged to a wealthy scion, and the other, who quickly becomes inseparable from Vaughn.
The romantic comedy is rather cliche driven – you know the ending as soon as the characters are revealed – but this movie was not designed to win an Oscar. It was designed to make as many people laugh as possible, and on this level it succeeds in a big way, as I've never heard an audience laughing as much as they were for Wedding Crashers.
With Christopher Walken in all his glory taking on the role of the females' father, and Jane Seymour giving an extraordinarily strong performance as an especially desperate housewife, the supporting cast helps to add another ring of charm to the film (not to mention some key cameo roles).
While simply an extension of their dominant movie personalities, the two main characters make Wedding Crashers strong by playing off of their strongest skills – Vaughn is his usual cynical self, and Wilson manages to portray an affable charm that he has pioneered from movies like Zoolander and Meet the Parents.
But simply put, people will be remembering this movie as Vaughn's, not Wilson's, because he is so much more outrageous as a character. Like Will Ferrell in Old School, this could be the movie that transcends Vince Vaughn into an A-List comic actor.
The movie's biggest fault is that it bogs down in the last third of the movie. Wilson's bland metamorphosis of character, combined with Vaughn's comparatively few scenes make the ending seem like it should have came twenty minutes earlier in the two-hour movie. These are not major problems; some would even argue that this portion of the film makes it worth taking a date to. However, it doesn't really jibe well with the flow and feel of the movie, and as such, it becomes a little repetitive.
Wedding Crashers is a movie every comedy fan should see. Even if you aren't typically into the antics of misbehaving men, it still will have you chuckling on the drive home. And shouldn't that be what a comedy is supposed to do?