Some of the supporting players, like Ignacio Serricchio as a gay wedding planner who isn’t quite what he seems and Jenifer Lewis as Hart’s assistant, add some oomph to the proceedings. Meanwhile, Gad (who voiced Olaf in Frozen, played a sex addict in Thanks for Sharing and Zach Braff’s ne’er-do-well brother in Wish I Was Here) isn’t given much to do except look dim and dejected, the neutered straight man to Hart’s neutered real-life cartoon. 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 last year’s About Last Night remake and even his endearingly yappy wannabe cop in another slapdash buddy flick, Ride Along, were more compelling. Too bad it’s not enough for Doug and Jimmy to have fun they’re forced to learn something in the process, too, as suggested by the perfunctory heart-to-hearts the two have in the film’s third act, acoustic guitars strumming in the background. Moments like that one, as well as another that finds Doug and Jimmy hitting the dance floor at a wedding - breaking out moves ranging from hip hop to disco to Charleston with incongruous flair - momentarily breathe some much-needed comic life into The Wedding Ringer.
#THE WEDDING RINGER MOVIE#
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. 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.
Even a bachelor party set piece in which the term “service dog” is given stomach-turning new meaning (peanut butter lovers, be warned) feels half-hearted and half-thought-out you giggle because of the situation’s bullying perversity, not because the execution is actually funny. Garelick and Lavender consistently flirt with outrageousness without ever going all the way. Dumb and Dumber To, to cite the brothers’ most recent (and overzealously maligned) film, for all its shortcomings, committed much more fully to its forehead-slapping idiocy, earning heartier laughs than anything in The Wedding Ringer. But here, almost everything feels anemic. Politically incorrect, lowest-common-denominator comedy and body horror humor can be sublime - see the best of those wildly erratic Farrelly brothers - when the timing is sharp and the staging inspired.
#THE WEDDING RINGER PROFESSIONAL#
Soon enough, he’s employing professional best man Jimmy Callahan (Hart) 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.Īs 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. Alas, Doug is soft-spoken and overweight, which, in testosterone-drunk comedies like this one, means that he has no friends.
/GettyImages-599541375-5919c09c3df78c7a8c4d1310.jpg "the wedding ringer")
Read more Kevin Hart on Bill Cosby, Avoiding Controversy and How Sony Apologized for “Whore” Commentĭirected 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). holiday weekend, coupled with the presence of stand-up star Kevin Hart (most recently seen as Chris Rock’s agent in Top Five), could give the movie a big boost at the box office. Still, a welcoming release slot over the Martin Luther King Jr. An odd-couple bromance spiked with gross-out humor of a mainly unimaginative sort, The Wedding Ringer largely fails to accomplish its most basic mission: making us laugh. But a certain derivative, deja-vu quality isn’t the only sin this lazy, numbingly routine, very occasionally amusing comedy commits.
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