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Title: The Wedding Ringer (2015)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Kevin Hart | ... | ||
| Josh Gad | ... | ||
| Affion Crockett | ... |
Reggie /
Drysdale
|
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| Kaley Cuoco | ... |
Gretchen Palmer
(as Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting)
|
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| Jorge Garcia | ... | ||
| Dan Gill | ... | ||
| Corey Holcomb | ... |
Otis /
Alzado
|
|
| Ken Howard | ... |
Ed Palmer
|
|
 |
Colin Kane | ... | |
| Cloris Leachman | ... |
Grandma Palmer
|
|
| Jenifer Lewis | ... |
Doris Jenkins
|
|
| Alan Ritchson | ... | ||
| Mimi Rogers | ... |
Lois Palmer
|
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| Aaron Takahashi | ... | ||
| Olivia Thirlby | ... | ||
Doug Harris (Josh Gad) is a lovable but socially awkward groom-to-be with a problem: he has no best man. With less than two weeks to go until he marries the girl of his dreams (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting), Doug is referred to Jimmy Callahan (Kevin Hart), owner and CEO of Best Man, Inc., a company that provides flattering best men for socially challenged guys in need. What ensues is a hilarious wedding charade as they try to pull off the big con, and an unexpected budding bromance between Doug and his fake best man Jimmy. Written by Sony Pictures Entertainment
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"The Wedding Ringer" is another modern comedy that tries to have it both ways. It goes for gross-out, outrageous humour, referencing topics like child abuse and zoophilia, but also tries for moments of soppiness. It gets neither, perhaps because the script is just so clichéd and yet poorly assembled that it seems to lurch from one familiar moment to the next. It's like the movie has a split personality, one good, one evil, both exhausted.
The movie opens with the suave, charming pretend best man played by Kevin Hart (is he the "Wedding Ringer" of the title? What is a "wedding ringer"?) killing it in his role as a best friend for hire, fooling everyone with a marvelous speech. The guy who hired him thinks they might actually be friends, but no! Hart is a cold S.O.B. who is only in it for the money. But could he possibly have a heart (no pun intended) after all?
Anyway, our hero tracks him down to employ his services as a best man for his own wedding - he's an average looking fat guy with no friends who has improbably convinced some blonde babe to marry him: Kaley Cuoco, who has made a career of playing the blonde babe with an improbable connection to quirky geeks and misfits.
If you aren't clichéd out by now, it gets worse: Kevin Hart doesn't want take the job! He laughs in the hero's face!
Just once I would like to see a movie which begins with someone being offered a job and them accepting it. Why do they ALWAYS have to turn it down at first? Of course, something happens - who cares what, it's so trite you stop paying attention - to make Hart change his mind.
Then we get obligatory scenes of Hart and the loser hero - Josh Gad, I think the actor who plays him is called - rehearsing for their pretend friendship. In a wiser comedy, this material could actually be poignant and truthful, but of course it just goes for silly montages showing ridiculous ways of faking photos to convince people they have a history.
The movie gets more than a little weird in its reliance on cliché when Hart has to assemble a group of groomsmen who will also pretend to be the loser hero's friends, and exclusively chooses weirdos. Why would someone as gifted at the con as Hart's character is shoot himself in the foot so ridiculously by choosing his partners in crime so poorly? They look like they're not even from the same universe as him. I fear, reader, it is because believable conmen like Hart's character would become a bit creepy if we saw them fool everybody to that extent. Not to be - we need easy laughs, again, to distract from the essential sadness of the movie's premise, that some people don't have friends and have to buy them to avoid embarrassment. We don't get those laughs, but never mind.
If the movie didn't lose me here, the "Bachelor Party"/"Hangover Part Twelve" scene that came soon after did. We needed the gross out, and the graphic male nudity, so we get a party which spirals out of control and, wouldn't you know it, all the freaky groomsmen's weirdness comes in handy after all, as if this were a kids' movie circa 1994, trying to teach us to value the individuality of people.
Or, you know, perhaps the filmmakers just ran out of grown up movie clichés and started ripping off "The Mighty Ducks". There is also an obligatory sports scene, with quick editing of people getting rammed into, falling over, getting muddy... and then the heroes winning, despite the presence of the 6'10" Ed "Too Tall" Jones, a football hero in real life, and another guy who's 6'6". They could have made this scene at least halfway believable by casting average guys. What was the point of making the opposite team actual NFL retirees?
You know how it's going to end between Hart & Gad. What may be harder to believe is that they try for a sweet moment after some of the other garbage the movie contains. It veers between gross out and glucose to quickly it could give you whiplash. Hart does have a few funny moments though. As with "Get Hard", he is the only thing about this movie that works.