This is another review that I'm proceeding to move from another site. I actually gave Wedding Crashers only a so-so review, despite the fact that most people loved it:
From the same comedic team (more or less) that brought you Zoolander, Dodgeball, and Old School, the latest annual installment of a comedy has arrived about people who don’t actually exist (frat boys who technically aren’t college students, professional dodgeball players, etc), but could very easily exist when you think about it.
The comedic team that I’m talking about is combination of at least one guy with the last name Wilson, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell who rotate playing the lead, playing the sidekick/rival, not being in the movie at all, and providing a much loved 2-minute cameo. Owen Wilson and Vaughn take the leads as two more characters that guys could easily enjoy vicariously living through for a couple hours: John Beckwith and Jeremy Klein (Wilson) are two divorce lawyers who spend their spare time crashing weddings solely to meet girls.
After years of practice they’ve refined it down to an art. One of the best running comic gags, in fact, is that they have a lengthy rule book that they memorize and regularly cite from in various situations.
The story begins when after a very successful wedding season, shown through a well-made opening montage; the two buddies decide to end off the season with a bang by crashing what will be their most high stakes wedding to date. Why this wedding is a bigger deal to them than any other wedding is beyond me, but nevertheless, the two go to the wedding and both find themselves with bigger messes than they can clean up by wedding’s end. Jeremy falls for one of the bride’s sisters, Claire, and all is going well until he meets her boyfriend. Rachel McAdams (The Notebook) plays Claire a little too lackadaisically charming to come off as anything but clichéd.
John, meanwhile, has such good luck with the bride’s other sister that he manages to have sex with her before the wedding is even over. Unfortunately, she mistakes his love of the chase for true love and his efforts to flee the scene get foiled by his love-struck partner in crime who insists they stick around. This is the point in the movie when, like John, it would be best to flee the scene ourselves.
While the film is lined with sharp and hilarious snippets of dialogue throughout, the story is unevenly paced and it never really gets back to that screwball comedy feel it attains in the film’s first half hour.
If not for the fact that these guys will probably be appearing in movie theaters again in some cameo or comedy vehicle before I even finish mourning their failure, I’d have been disappointed because with a few minor tweaks, I could have seen this movie working. For example, one of the downturns that are used in these types of romantic comedies to prevent the guy and girl from getting together before working things out takes up almost a year of the story and one of the characters gets depressed to the point of feeling suicidal. In this scene and in general, the movie too often drifts a little too far away from lighthearted-comedy mode. Considering how with characters that revel in the joy of taking advantage of girls at weddings, the movie’s tone is quite cynical when you think about it, it wouldn’t be a good idea to get the audience taking the film too seriously at all.
Showing posts with label Vince Vaughn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vince Vaughn. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Review of Dodgeball (2004)
Dodgeball is a riveting and sharp comedy about a sport we all stopped taking seriously after our last elementary school gym class.
Vince Vaughn plays Peter LaFluer, owner of a rundown gym called Average Joe's. His membership total consists of just five, but nevertheless, the personable LaFluer is happy to be of service to his clients, even if they are all pathetically out of shape and a little off the norm. His gym is in financial trouble, however, and LaFluer is notified at the start of the film that he has thirty days to pay off its loan or it will be shut down. LaFluer's gym will be bought out by Globo, owned by the villainous White Goodman. Stiller pulls out the stops as Goodman, taking every opportunity to make himself dislike-able so that his demise at the film's end will be all the more sweeter.
In need of a desperate solution, LaFluer and his clients sit down in his office and brainstorm. The solution comes from Gordon (Root) who reads in his magazine Obscure Sports Quarterly about an upcoming dodgeball tournament in which they could win the required money, so the ragtag bunch sets out to learn the sport and win the tournament. Their biggest obstacle is that in order to ensure Average Joe's shutdown, Goodman fields a team of bodybuilders to win the tournament and deny LaFluer the money, setting the stage for a David vs Goliath match up in the upcoming tournament.
If there's one thing, aside from the satire, that there is to love about this movie, it's the quirky group of guys who comprise LaFluer's team. With the exception of Dwight (Williams), whose quirkiest attribute is his hatred of his previous job at the airport, the group is a very creative assemblage of underdogs. Vaughn plays the straight man, next to Stiller, his own team, and pretty much everyone else in the movie. You'd think that the love interest Christine Taylor as the lawyer, initially hired by Goodman to shut down Average Joe's but ends up joining the team out of disgust for the villain, but she turns out to have her own weird attributes.
In a sense, Dodgeball is sort of a quasi-sports film because it centers around a sport that doesn't actually exist in terms of a spectator base, and uses that to poke fun at some of the sillier aspects of our present-day athletic culture. Be warned, this film is merciless, attacking everything from bodybuilders to ESPN to team uniforms. I particularly found it hilarious that the tournament was broadcast on ESPN 8, which probably is only a couple years away at this rate, and that one of the sports commentators (Arrested Development's Jason Bateman) knew absolutely nothing of what he was talking about.
The movie gets caught up in all the satire, however, and towards the end drifts off into an absurd ending that really left a bad taste in my mouth. The ending threw so much of reality out the window, that it felt like a Mel Brooks film, which is a shame because up until the last couple minutes, the film did a terrific job at cracking out hilarious jokes within the context of a story. Looking back, though, the first couple of hours more than make up for the last couple of minutes, and I would have rather the movie aimed high and missed a couple notes, rather than being safe and not being as funny.
Vince Vaughn plays Peter LaFluer, owner of a rundown gym called Average Joe's. His membership total consists of just five, but nevertheless, the personable LaFluer is happy to be of service to his clients, even if they are all pathetically out of shape and a little off the norm. His gym is in financial trouble, however, and LaFluer is notified at the start of the film that he has thirty days to pay off its loan or it will be shut down. LaFluer's gym will be bought out by Globo, owned by the villainous White Goodman. Stiller pulls out the stops as Goodman, taking every opportunity to make himself dislike-able so that his demise at the film's end will be all the more sweeter.
In need of a desperate solution, LaFluer and his clients sit down in his office and brainstorm. The solution comes from Gordon (Root) who reads in his magazine Obscure Sports Quarterly about an upcoming dodgeball tournament in which they could win the required money, so the ragtag bunch sets out to learn the sport and win the tournament. Their biggest obstacle is that in order to ensure Average Joe's shutdown, Goodman fields a team of bodybuilders to win the tournament and deny LaFluer the money, setting the stage for a David vs Goliath match up in the upcoming tournament.
If there's one thing, aside from the satire, that there is to love about this movie, it's the quirky group of guys who comprise LaFluer's team. With the exception of Dwight (Williams), whose quirkiest attribute is his hatred of his previous job at the airport, the group is a very creative assemblage of underdogs. Vaughn plays the straight man, next to Stiller, his own team, and pretty much everyone else in the movie. You'd think that the love interest Christine Taylor as the lawyer, initially hired by Goodman to shut down Average Joe's but ends up joining the team out of disgust for the villain, but she turns out to have her own weird attributes.
In a sense, Dodgeball is sort of a quasi-sports film because it centers around a sport that doesn't actually exist in terms of a spectator base, and uses that to poke fun at some of the sillier aspects of our present-day athletic culture. Be warned, this film is merciless, attacking everything from bodybuilders to ESPN to team uniforms. I particularly found it hilarious that the tournament was broadcast on ESPN 8, which probably is only a couple years away at this rate, and that one of the sports commentators (Arrested Development's Jason Bateman) knew absolutely nothing of what he was talking about.
The movie gets caught up in all the satire, however, and towards the end drifts off into an absurd ending that really left a bad taste in my mouth. The ending threw so much of reality out the window, that it felt like a Mel Brooks film, which is a shame because up until the last couple minutes, the film did a terrific job at cracking out hilarious jokes within the context of a story. Looking back, though, the first couple of hours more than make up for the last couple of minutes, and I would have rather the movie aimed high and missed a couple notes, rather than being safe and not being as funny.
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