“Life’s a Party. Crash It.” That was the tagline New Line Cinema sold in the summer of 2005, and for a while the movie behind it delivered exactly that. Wedding Crashers put Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in suits, handed them a calendar of strangers’ nuptials, and turned the reception hall into a hunting ground. David Dobkin directed. Bob Fisher and Steve Faber wrote it. The film runs 119 minutes and scored a 6.4 out of 10 — a respectable number that flatters the first hour and lets the second one off easy.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
John Beckwith and Jeremy Grey Work the Room
The premise is simple and a little ugly. John Beckwith and Jeremy Grey are divorce mediators in Washington, D.C. On weekends they crash weddings under false identities to meet women and sleep with them. The film’s own synopsis calls them emotional criminals who use a woman’s hopes and dreams for their own carnal gain. That is not a critic’s read. That is the pitch.
Wilson plays John. Vaughn plays Jeremy. The two have a rhythm that carries the movie further than the script does — Vaughn talks in fast, looping runs, Wilson drifts in behind him with a drawl. It works. For about an hour, Wedding Crashers is the best version of the movie it could be.
Then Jeremy talks John into crashing the wedding of the eldest daughter of U.S. Treasury Secretary William Cleary. Christopher Walken plays the Secretary. At the reception, the pair split up. Jeremy sets his sights on Gloria Cleary, played by Isla Fisher. John sets his sights on Claire Cleary, played by Rachel McAdams.
A Virgin, a Boyfriend, and a Weekend Invitation
What happens next is where the film starts to wobble. Jeremy has sex with Gloria on a nearby beach. She tells him afterward that she was a virgin. She is possessive and infatuated and says she loves him. John, meanwhile, falls for Claire, the maid of honor, and gets interrupted by her boyfriend, Sack Lodge.
Bradley Cooper plays Sack. He is hotheaded, unfaithful and disrespectful behind Claire’s back. That is the whole character. The film needs him to be a villain and gives him almost nothing to work with beyond volume.
Gloria invites John and Jeremy to an extended weekend at the family compound in Maryland. Jeremy wants to run. John overrules him to stay close to Claire. So the crashers become houseguests, and the movie becomes a farce about a family that is stranger than any wedding.
Kathleen Cleary, Todd Cleary, and Grandma Mary
The weekend is a parade of set pieces. Jane Seymour plays Kathleen Cleary, the Secretary’s wife, and she comes on to John sexually. Keir O’Donnell plays Todd Cleary, the brooding artistic son, and he tries to seduce Jeremy during the night. Ellen Albertini Dow plays Grandma Mary Cleary.
Then there is Gloria. She massages Jeremy’s penis at dinner. Later she ties his wrists and ankles to a bedframe and rapes him. The film plays this for laughs. That choice has aged badly, and it was already a strange one in 2005 — the movie asks you to find Jeremy’s terror funny while it asks you to take his romance with Gloria seriously.
Sack also injures Jeremy repeatedly during a game of touch football. At dinner, John spikes Sack’s wine with eye drops to make him sick and buy time with Claire. The next day, John and Claire bond on a sailing trip. Sack takes the pair on a hunting trip and shoots Jeremy in the buttocks. While Jeremy recovers, John and Claire ride bikes to a secluded beach, where Claire finally admits she is not happy with Sack.
- Owen Wilson as John Beckwith
- Vince Vaughn as Jeremy Grey
- Rachel McAdams as Claire Cleary
- Isla Fisher as Gloria Cleary
- Christopher Walken as Secretary William Cleary
- Bradley Cooper as Sack Lodge
- Jane Seymour as Kathleen Cleary
- Keir O’Donnell as Todd Cleary
- Dwight Yoakam as Mr. Kroeger
Will Ferrell shows up uncredited as Chazz Reinhold, a wedding and funeral crasher who mentored Jeremy. It is a short scene and it lands harder than most of the third act. John McCain, then a senator, and Democratic strategist James Carville make brief cameos congratulating the Secretary and his wife.
The Numbers Behind the Crash
Wedding Crashers opened on July 15, 2005, through New Line Cinema. It grossed $288.5 million worldwide on a $40 million budget. It was the sixth highest grossing film of 2005 in the United States. It became the first R-rated comedy to make $200 million at the domestic box office.
- Runtime: 119 minutes
- Release date: July 15, 2005
- Budget: $40 million
- Worldwide gross: $288.5 million
- Metacritic: 64/100
- Score: 6.4/10
Those numbers matter more than the movie’s quality does, and that is the real story here. The success of Wedding Crashers has been credited with helping revive adult-oriented, R-rated comedies. That is a genuine legacy. A generation of studio comedies got greenlit because this one sold tickets.
What Actually Holds Up
The case for Wedding Crashers rests on Wilson and Vaughn. Their chemistry is the engine, and it runs clean for the first half. The wedding-crashing montage, the reception scenes, the slow realization that John actually likes Claire — that is a real movie with a real pulse.
The case against it is the back half. The Cleary compound is a collection of gags that do not build. Kathleen’s advance on John goes nowhere. Todd’s pursuit of Jeremy goes nowhere. Sack is a cartoon who exists to be poisoned and shot. The film keeps adding characters instead of deepening the two it has.
And the Gloria problem is not a small one. The movie wants Jeremy’s arc to be about a man who stops running and commits. But it gets there through a woman who is written as a predator and a punchline. Fisher commits fully. The script gives her nothing to commit to.
So where does that leave the verdict? Wedding Crashers is a good comedy with a bad second act and one joke it should never have made. The 6.4 is fair. It rewards the parts that work and does not pretend the rest does.
What is worth watching now is the casting. McAdams makes Claire a person instead of a prize. Walken does more with a raised eyebrow than the script does with pages. Cooper took a thin role and turned it into the kind of performance that got him bigger ones. The movie is a launching pad more than a destination.
Wedding Crashers earned its place in the comedy canon on box office alone. It did not earn it on craft. The first hour is a party worth crashing. The second hour is the morning after.
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