Wedding Crashers (15)

Lukewarm reception

Actually, the real draw is Wilson, whose straw-blond hair, surfer drawl and Picasso-esque nose constitute such a distinctive part of the movie landscape. Whether goofing off with his pal Ben Stiller (Meet The Parents, Starsky and Hutch) and Jackie Chan (Shanghai Knights) or fronting the more left-field comedies of Wes Anderson (he's terrific in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) Wilson has become one of the most consistently endearing performers around.

This time he and Vaughn play divorce lawyers and lifelong friends who like to plan wedding-crashing as if it were a battle campaign. They've become such dab hands that they bet one another on the order of service ("I'll lay you 20 it's Paul's first letter to the Corinthians") and have a dozen different backstories to impress whatever single girls take their fancy. (They usually pretend some heroic occupation and end their spiel with the line "We lost a lot of good men out there").

Their greatest challenge arrives when a big society event is announced in Washington DC, "the Kentucky Derby of weddings" where the chicks will be as fresh and plentiful as the canapés. The good news is that Wilson and Vaughn fancy different bridesmaids (Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher), the bad news is that their politician father turns out to be Christopher Walken, whose basilisk glare could shrivel a man at 20 paces. The plot, already testing credulity, nosedives into the absurd as our two crashers make themselves so agreeable that they're invited to a family weekend at Walken's estate, and gradually the script (by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher) exchanges its enjoyable sleaze for something closer to Meet The Parents. No bad thing, you may be thinking, but this proves a very feeble imitation, and even when Vaughn has to endure a night from hell (tied to the bed, then propositioned by the weird brother) the movie looks second-hand.

Even if you overlook the implausibilities - how likely is it that the pair would elude security at such an event, and that neither bride nor groom would think to ask who they are? - there's a shoddiness in the writing that Vaughn's motormouth improvising only partially covers. The obstacle of a vile WASP boyfriend who's also a cheat cedes a moral high ground to the crashers which they've scarcely earned. It gathers a little flurry of energy at the end thanks to an uncredited Will Ferrell as a funeral crasher, but by this point the movie has gone as lightweight and predictable as confetti.