The Wedding Ringer – Film Review

Posted on 11th February 201513th February 2015 by

Director: Jeremy Garelick

Starring: Kevin Hart, Josh Gad and Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting

Release Date: Feb 20

Any film that opens with The Black-Eyed Peas ‘I Gotta Feeling’ is a film that is desperately clutching at straws. Humour is painted in broad strokes in this ‘comedy’, with an overly predictable plot, one-note characters and an utterly ridiculous premise, even by romantic comedy standards.

The Wedding Ringer is an amateurish cocktail of Hitch and I Love You, Man, with the zest of those movies watered down with rigid story-telling. Kevin Hart plays Jimmy, an entrepreneur who offers his services to ‘friendless losers’. For a price, he takes on the role of their fake best man, to ensure that they look as good as they possibly can on their wedding day. The fact that these ‘friendless losers’ are perfectly capable of establishing strong romantic relationships but are incapable of making casual friendships is a tough enough pill to swallow.
The fact that they are willing to pay the obscene amounts of money that Jimmy charges, simply to escape social awkwardness, makes the pill a basketball sized suppository. And if you find that sort of commentary to be a little crude, then you’ve definitely chosen the wrong film to even consider.

The emotional core of this story rests on the shoulders of Doug (Gad). Doug is a fat lump and, naturally, this means he has no friends. Which, of course, is a problem… because his demanding fiancè (Cuoco-Sweeting) insists that he has no less than seven groomsmen at their wedding, for reasons that are totally unimportant, really, pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain!
This is the biggest job Jimmy will ever undertake, but it’s important he remembers his one rule of business: Doug is renting a best man, not buying a best friend. Can you guess how this will end yet?

Of course, even a film with such a predictable plot can get a solid 3 stars if it elicits a couple of laughs. Sadly, The Wedding Ringer falls pretty short in this area, due in large part to an uninspired and forgettable supporting cast. For the purposes of this scam, the extra six groomsmen are each required to have a signature party trick at the wedding. This is the closest we get to characterization, and even then, their characters feel unnaturally foul. It’s like walking in on a crowd of The Hangover wannabes. In fact, the only reason Hurley from Lost seems to be included at all is for the sake of a Lost reference. Which, in itself, feels like a studio-conceived after-thought.

Jimmy spends the majority of the film distracting and deceiving wedding guests in an effort to win them over, and it often feels as though this is what Hart is doing to the audience as well. Anytime the proceedings begin to fall into a rut, he throws chilli into someone’s lap, or sets someone on fire. His enthusiasm can’t be faulted, but the writing is a godawful mess with no direction whatsoever. A drunken police chase and american football match against geriatrics are both inserted for laughs/filler, and neither succeed well in either task.

While this is nothing more than a star vehicle for Hart, it’s a shame that he entrusted his reputation with an untested director. Jimmy has a love interest, but this has less to do with the story and more to do with the studio having one too many extras on the day. Heart-to-Hart talks are shot with no enthusiasm or skill whatsoever. And it’s extremely difficult to relate to either of the main characters when they come out with knockout lines such as “You’re a best friend for a price, but nobody’s when it counts”.

This gem is spouted by the very ‘nothing’ Josh Gad, a man who has garnered fame for being the voice of Olaf in Disney’s Frozen, and has since then over-reached. He simply is not ready for a lead role as he seems to have flunked out of the Kevin James school of comedy. Whereas James has rarely been a comedy legend, he has at least remained ineffably likable. Try as he might to be a lovable loser, Gad is just someone you hope to keep walking past on the street without looking back. The new Seth Rogen or Zach Galifianakis he most certainly is not.

So with woeful writing, annoying one-note characters and fart-joke humour, is there any reason to see this film at all? Well sure… if you desperately want to see Kevin Hart do an impression of an Ethiopian Jew at a funeral.

Score: 1/5
Written by Stephen Hill

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