During the entertaining opening montage of Wedding Crashers, our heroes, John (Wilson) and Jeremy (Vaughn), skillfully ply their trade during the summer wedding season, crashing all variety of nuptials, joking with old-timers, making balloons for kiddies, giving toasts, laughing, dancing, delighting strangers and, of course, maneuvering a huge cross section of bridesmaids and other women into bed. It's the movie's best bit: spry and funny, free of the plotting conventions of romantic comedies.
Afterward, the story quickly unfolds. John, it turns out, is uncomfortable with their shenanigans—they aren't that young, these two—but Jeremy talks him into crashing the wedding of a daughter of U.S. Sen. Cleary (Christopher Walken, never as funny as you might expect).
The two get entangled with Cleary's other daughters. Jeremy makes quick work of Gloria (Isla Fisher), but the hunter becomes hunted when she turns out to be a nymphomaniac. John, meanwhile, finds himself smitten with the sweet, likable Claire (McAdams). The crashers are invited to the Cleary summer home for the weekend and the stage is set. Jeremy tries to steer clear of Gloria while reluctantly helping John win Claire away from her snooty boyfriend Zack (Bradley Cooper).
Some of the hijinks are undercooked (Jane Seymour vamping as a modern-day Mrs. Robinson and Cleary's neurotic, gay, painter son, which is not as amusing as it sounds). And what is supposed to be a comic set piece, a quail hunt, is over before it begins. Still, Vaughn and Wilson play well against each other, spouting off the elaborate rules of their profession when one or the other is about to break them. These guys do great off-the-cuff.
There's no doubt either would make superb real wedding crashers, such is their abundant charm and nonchalance, and for all their rapid-fire talk, we recognize something guy-like and human about them.
Admittedly, movies starring some combination of Wilson, Vaughn, Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell are as ubiquitous as weddings themselves. Maybe these actors keep hooking up because they work so well together. Maybe it's because a movie starring any of these guys solo would grow tedious fast. I don't know. But I'll take Vaughn and Wilson over, let's say, Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe.