Movie Review – The Wedding Ringer

There are often times when I sit down and watch a movie that has been critically panned, that I wonder how could they have gotten this movie so wrong? It leaves me equally flabbergasted when I take the time to watch a movie that everyone raved about, so much so that it was at one time the second most popular movie on Apples iTunes Music Store.

The trailer looked good, but slogging through half of the movie, I seriously wondered where I had gone wrong! Good popular reviews, well known cast, promise and potential all going down the drain with a feeling of well.. BLAH.

What cinematic mediocrity am I talking about? The Wedding Ringiner. Directed by Jeremy Garelick (The Break Up and Sick Day). Starring Kevin Hart (Top Five, This Is The End), Josh Gad (Frozen, Love and Other Drugs), and Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting (Your Mommy Kills Animals, Picture Perfect, and The Last Ride.)

The whole premise of the movie, centers around Dough Harris (Josh Gad), who is getting married to the girl of his dreams is in 2 weeks, and not only doesn’t have a best man, but because he inherited his father’s business shortly after law school has not had a social life and has no friends and hence no wedding party. He hires Jimmy Callahan (Kevin Hart), of Best Man INC. to provide scripted cast members to play each member of the wedding party and create the Josh’s back story.

Jimmy is initially reluctant because in the wedding casting business an entire wedding party is considered so impossible, there is actually a name for it. Called a “Golden Tuxedo”, however Kimmy eventually comes around and decides to take the job.

What Josh eventually discovers is that the events that they are scripting for his back story are all things we would like to do in real life, and that the “girl of his dreams”, is only interested in him because he is so boring and such a recluse and does not really love him.

The story was predictable, the jokes as tired as reusing the name of the immensely successful The Wedding Singer, comes of about as phony as the characters of “Best Man INC.” Earning The Wedding Ringer a lack luster rating of 28% by critics, and a surprising 69% by audience score.

This is a movie for young adults, or perhaps something to watch when you just need a brainless distraction. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t something I would honestly recommend anyone to watch and I did feel like I wanted my 70 minutes back.

I guess the moral of the story is, being a movie critic is kind of like being a weather man, They only have to be right %50 of the time, when they are wrong you wonder how many nice it must be being able to be in a profession when you can be that wrong and still keep your job. When they are right and you just didn’t listen to them, you chide yourself for being so unprepared.

2 and half stars from Brent’s world, because it was watchable, but it did not grab my attention the way I thought it would, and I now find the title a bit misleading as it did sound allot like “That other great movie with a similar name.”