Sunday, Jul. 10, 2005

We Now Pronounce You ...

By RICHARD CORLISS

They crash weddings to sleep with girls. John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) are Washington lawyers who, to indulge their inner frat boys, show up at the church as third cousins of the best man's stepuncle, and after the reception they have great sex with women they need never see again. Now the season is over, but there's one more wedding to crash. A prominent politico (Christopher Walken) is giving away a daughter, and, as plot would have it, he's got two more to spare: horny Gloria (Isla Fisher) for Jeremy, foxy Claire (Rachel McAdams) for John. Gee, do ya think the lads'll fall in love with their prey?

Wedding Crashers, written by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher and savvily directed by David Dobkin, has Summer Hit engraved all over it, like an invitation to the marriage of The Wedding Singer and Old School. It glamorizes the men's predation by making them charmers who have a great time, and give one too: at receptions Jeremy makes balloon animals for the kids, John schmoozes with the seniors. It conjures up a convenient villain in Claire's boyfriend Sach (Bradley Cooper), a shark-faced sociopath who fools everyone in the family but no one in the audience. It offers the dream of creative fraudulence and the payoff of a frog kissing a princess, if he can only find the right mix of lies and lust. And in the performances of Vaughn and Wilson, it parades a screen chemistry rarely seen since the original Butch and Sundance.

The movie has a carload of gay jokes, which is odd, since John and Jeremy's bonding is, well, not exactly homoerotic, more like the intimacy of college-prankster soul mates--fratonic. They may want to have sex with strangers, but they most enjoy being a team. And the most heartfelt I-love-yous the guys say are to each other. The script's burden is to pry the buddies apart and get them to chase women meaningfully.

To get into the pants and hearts of the audience, the movie uses as many ruses as the guys. Damned if most of them don't work. Wedding Crashers is a slick operation, and Vaughn and Wilson are a couple of three-card-monte dealers whose patter is so engaging, you may not mind being swindled into thinking this is a really good movie.