Movie Review: 'The Wedding Ringer'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Unless your expectations are downright subterranean, this one will put you through the wringer.
The Wedding Ringer is a cartoonish, bromantic comedy about a friendless loner and a professional friend.
Josh Gad plays financially successful tax attorney Doug Harris, a likable but socially awkward fiancé who needs but doesn't have a best man for his wedding, which is only ten days away.
His out-of-his-league bride-to-be, Gretchen Palmer, played by Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting (Penny on TV's "The Big Bang Theory"), is adamant about having a perfect wedding. And she has nine bridesmaids who will be in the wedding. So Doug gets to invite nine groomsmen to his upcoming nuptials, let alone his best man.
Only trouble is, he has no friends.
That's why Doug turns to Jimmy Callahan, played by Kevin Hart, the owner and CEO of Best Man Inc,, a company that provides fake best men and groomsmen for grooms-to-be who lack and thus need them.
What he must opt for is what the company calls The Golden Tux -– the highest level of service and the film's original title –- in which he and his fake friends manage to fool the hundreds of guests.
How and why Jimmy chooses these particular weirdos as his masquerading scam-mates (in an idiotic plot thrust that makes no sense on any level and finds Doug describing them as "The Goonies, all grown up and turned into rapists") are concerns left unaddressed by the insultingly arbitrary script.
Debuting director Jeremy Garelick co-wrote the lazy script with Jay Lavender, with whom he co-wrote The Break-Up. Their hopeless screenplay, with its laughably implausible plot and outlandish disregard for internal logic or even vaguely convincing human behavior, then does the equivalent of leaving their theme at the altar.
That is, instead of exploring the main characters or their actions, they resort to lengthy, pointless, amateurish slapstick sequences, including a muddy touch football game and a wild bachelor party during which the movie stops dead in its tracks.
Not that it was going anywhere anyway.
Motormouth Hart, dialing it down a notch, and close-to-the-vest Gad are skilled talents, and they do more with the script they've been handed than said script deserves.
But they and the friendship they're building get buried under the wrongheaded excesses of the film's set pieces.
As for the members of the large supporting cast, including Olivia Thirlby, Ken Howard, Mimi Rogers, Cloris Leachman, Josh Peck, Jorge Garcia, and Jenifer Lewis, they're collectively wasted and labor mightily to conceal their embarrassment.
So we'll befriend 1½ stars out of 4 for the painfully contrived best-man-for-hire farce The Wedding Ringer, an objectionable marriage of creativity and commerce that makes us want to speak now instead of forever holding our peace.
