The Wedding Ringer ** (2015, Kevin Hart, Josh Gad, Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting) – Movie Review

Kevin Hart and Josh Gad have their work cut out to make this bromance wedding comedy funny. It would like to be The Hangover crossed with Wedding Crashers, but those prove tough acts to follow.

Hart plays Jimmy, a wisecracking entrepreneur, owner and CEO of Best Man Inc, who is hired by Gad’s character Doug, a dorky groom who has no friends, to be his best man at his wedding. It’s OK when Jimmy is wisecracking, but really not when the pair start to bond. Maybe they should just quietly go off and get a room.

This gleefully outmoded Loaded-era farce is expertly tailored for fans of cheerfully racist, sexist, misogynistic, ageist and homophobic comedy. It’s a shame it motors so completely on this because it starts off with an intriguing premise and there are many funny gags as well as no-nos in the script.

Hart and Gad may have their comedic skills and personal charms, but here a lot of the time they seem to be playing the roles of inept and unappealing comics who could never enter the realms of funny. And it’s hard to forgive a film that treats the lovely, funny Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting (from The Big Bang Theory) badly just because she’s actually really sweet and make her play the grasping bride-to-be Gretchen Palmer and a film that sets fire to Oscar-winning movie icon Cloris Leachman as Gretchen’s grandma, not to mention mistreating Mimi Rogers, whose only possible mistake so far has been to marry and divorce Tom Cruise, playing Gretchen’s mom. At least Ken Howard has a proper role as Gretchen’s dad, even if it is cynically unsympathetic.

It feels like screenwriters Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender have so many problems with women that they’re working it out on their characters. Or are they just kidding? Anyway, it’s enough to put you off bromances, for a while at any rate.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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