THE FIRST version of the script for The Wedding Ringer, a new comedy about a friendless schlub who rents a best man for his big day, was written back in 2002 – a fact that partly accounts for the whiff of stale leftovers that hangs over the movie from start to finish.
But a certain derivative, deja-vu quality isn’t the only sin this lazy, numbingly routine, very occasionally amusing comedy commits. An odd-couple bromance spiked with gross-out humour of a mainly unimaginative sort, The Wedding Ringer largely fails to accomplish its most basic mission: making us laugh.
Directed by Jeremy Garelick from a screenplay he wrote with Jay Lavender (the two formerly penned Jennifer Aniston-Vince Vaughn rom com The Break-Up), The Wedding Ringer opens with Doug (Josh Gad) nervously cold calling potential best men in preparation for his upcoming nuptials to Gretchen ( The Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting). Alas, Doug is soft-spoken and overweight, which, in testosterone-drunk comedies like this one, means that he has no friends. Soon enough, he’s employing professional best man Jimmy Callahan (KevinHart) and a rag-tag team of groomsmen, each of whom is an ostensibly yuk-worthy “type”: the Fat Guy (played by Jorge Garcia of Lost fame), the Asian (Aaron Takahashi), the Redneck, the Beefcake (with a stutter – even funnier!), etc., etc.
As Doug and his homies-for-hire get acquainted, we’re treated to a variety of gags, including a boy getting hit in the gut with a baseball and a man breaking his own arm for show, as well as jokes about rape, child molestation and testicular deformities.
Politically incorrect, lowest-common-denominator comedy and body horror humour can be sublime – see the best of those wildly erratic Farrelly brothers – when the timing is sharp and the staging inspired. But here, almost everything feels anaemic.
Slightly more amusing are some of the interactions between Doug and his future in-laws, thanks in large part to the skill of good actors slumming for a paycheck: Ken Howard as Gretchen’s macho dad, Mimi Rogers as her tightly wound mom, Olivia Thirlby as her too-cool-for-school younger sister and a sadly underused Cloris Leachman as her loopy grandma.
If the movie has a high point, it’s surely the family dinner sequence that devolves into total chaos, culminating in Granny going up in flames. Moments like that one momentarily breathe some much-needed comic life into The Wedding Ringer.
Hart offers a more restrained spin on his usual high-pitched, high-strung persona, but the role is essentially watered-down shtick; the manic swagger he brought to the About Last Night remake and even his endearingly yappy wannabe cop in another slapdash buddy flick, Ride Along, were more compelling. Meanwhile, Gad isn’t given much to do except look dim and dejected, the neutered straight man to Hart’s neutered real-life cartoon.
Visually, Garelick doesn’t attempt much though an opening sequence in which the camera snakes its way through a crowd of wedding guests dancing with diligent enthusiasm has some panache.
The rather obvious lesson here is that in the age of Apatow and his cronies, it takes more than fat dudes, dick jokes and dogs with wandering tongues to make us guffaw in spite of ourselves. Frankly, we’ve seen it all before. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter