It's a sad day for Hollywood comedy when good character actors skilled at improvisation are sidelined by terrible writing and dreadful plot lines.
"Wedding Crashers" could have been a good film. It has all the right ingredients, such as the goofy synergy of actors Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, a potentially funny story idea involving weddings and deceit and even believable romantic chemistry between Wilson and "Mean Girls" costar Rachel McAdams.
However, neither the inclusion of bizarro Christopher Walken nor the audience's laughter at a Lansing cinema on Friday afternoon could mask this film's vacant story line. Wilson and Vaughn star as John and Jeremy, respectively, two friends who have made a successful hobby out of crashing weddings.
Their fake identities not only fool bride and groom - who for some reason are never mystified by strange men at their reception - but also beautiful, sexually adventurous women desperate to be seduced by obvious lies.
A montage of various weddings hit up by the pair is enough to illustrate this point, where bridesmaid after bridesmaid is shown falling into bed with either man.
Audiences can overlook how ridiculous this is - the notion that all single women at weddings are desperate for men and will sleep with the first person who talks with them - because "Wedding Crashers" is a comedy. The audience isn't expecting complete realism here.
However, the film transitions between occasional laugh-out-loud humor and pitiful punch-line silence even more abruptly when John meets Claire Cleary (McAdams), the beautiful daughter of a politician (Walken), at her sister's upscale wedding.
With John determined to win over Claire and Jeremy pursued by Claire's other single sister, Gloria (Isla Fisher), the two men are thrown into a whirlwind weekend full of pompous Cleary relatives, sailing trips and quail hunting expeditions.
At this point Vaughn is at his improv best, but there's too much comedic cliché here, complete with the attempted seduction of John by Claire's middle-aged mother (Jane Seymour) and the similarly unwanted seduction of Jeremy by Claire's brother (Keir O'Donnell). The representation of the film's only gay character is both shallow and unrealistic.
Unlike better comedies in the same spirit, such as "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" and "Old School," "Wedding Crashers" proves even the most worthy performances will fall short if a film is written poorly enough.
