MOVIE REVIEW: The Wedding Ringer

Doug (Josh Gad) and Jimmy (Kevin Hart) in Screen Gems' THE WEDDING RINGER.

Doug (Josh Gad) and Jimmy (Kevin Hart) in Screen Gems' THE WEDDING RINGER.

Published Feb 6, 2015

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The Wedding Ringer

DIRECTOR: Jeremy Garelick

CAST: Josh Gad, Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, Kevin Hart, Jorge Garcia, Aaron Takahashi

CLASSIFICATION: 16 DLSV

RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes

RATING: 2 stars (out of 5)

Jon Frosch

The first version of the script for The Wedding Ringer, a comedy about a friendless schlub who rents a best man for his big day, was written in 2002 – a fact that partly accounts for the whiff of stale leftovers that hangs over the movie from start to finish.

Several films have indeed been there, done that – or variations of that – in the 12 years since. Bridesmaids and The Hangover all but redefined the pre-marriage debauchery sub-genre, the former with its sharply drawn characters and refreshing all-female twist, the latter with its anarchic bravado and winning shamelessness.

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, The Wedding Ringer opens with Doug (Gad) nervously cold-calling potential best men in preparation for his nuptials to Gretchen (Cuoco-Sweeting). Alas, Doug is softly- spoken and overweight, which, in testosterone-drunk comedies like this, means that he has no friends. 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 (Garcia), the Asian (Aaron Takahashi), the Redneck, the Beefcake (with a stutter – even funnier!), 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. Lowest-common-denominator comedy and body horror humour can be sublime when the timing is sharp and the staging inspired. But here, almost everything feels anaemic.

Garelick flirts with outrageousness without ever going all the way. 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.

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 paycheque: 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 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, 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 comic life into The Wedding Ringer.

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.

Hart offers a more restrained spin on his usual high-pitched, high-strung persona, but the role is essentially watered-down shtick. Gad isn’t given much to do except look dim and dejected, the neutered straight man to Hart’s neutered real-life cartoon.

Ignacio Serricchio as a gay wedding planner who isn’t quite what he seems adds some oomph to the proceedings.

The 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. Frankly, we’ve seen it all before. – The Hollywood Reporter

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