Jeremy’s Tophunder №63: Wedding Crashers

7 min readMay 29, 2020

When you look at the creative team behind Wedding Crashers, it’s not anyone with a name you recognize. One of the writers of the script barely has a Wikipedia page. This kind of gives away one of the points of pride for the movie — there’s an absurd amount of improvisation by pretty much all of the actors involved, but especially Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.

For the most part, the script was a loose outline of what needed to happen in each scene — where it started and where it was going, and how it fit into the larger narrative. In terms of the actual dialogue, sure, there was something written on the page, but for the lines that actually ended up in the final cut of the movie, various sources estimate that more than half of them were completely ad-libbed by the actors in the moment.

It makes it different from a lot of the other comedies that have blown up in the last 20 years or so. For example, Superbad was a script that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg had been writing for literally a decade, and Judd Apatow moved heaven and earth to get the movie made and make sure it was successful. It turned into probably the most highly anticipated comedy of the year, and it delivered. A few years later, The Hangover came with a similar amount of buzz — it was a Todd Phillips movie (who had directed Old School and contributed to writing Borat) set in Vegas with a strong cast. These are movies with high-profile people attached as writers and directors and producers, and the script was a known entity. Wedding Crashers wasn’t like that. Sure, there’s a lot of talent in the cast, but it’s not like the script was being raved about. The movie kind of just came out and was a surprise hit.

In a way, I guess this has been Vince Vaughn week. We did Old School last Friday, Dodgeball on Tuesday, and now we’re here with Wedding Crashers. The weird part is, I’m not even sure how much I like Vince Vaughn, but somehow he’s represented in five movies among my Tophunder (he also gets in with The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Anchorman). I’d say that Wedding Crashers is probably his best work, and probably the only movie where I consider him to be a true selling point. Like, yes, he’s good in Old School, but not nearly on the level of Will Ferrell. He’s also good in Dodgeball, but Ben Stiller blows him out of the water. Here, though, I’d say that he clearly out-does Owen Wilson, but that’s partly by design. In Old School and Dodgeball, for the most part, he’s playing the straight-man. Here, he’s the bombastic and outlandish one, which I think suits him a lot better. He’s made some forays into dramatic acting on the strength of his ability to be normal and relatable in absurd comedy movies, but he’s just not a very good dramatic actor (Season 2 of True Detective will back me up on this). He’s at his best when he’s being ridiculous, and he’s at his most perfectly ridiculous here.

While Rachel McAdams is probably better known for her work in Mean Girls, I’d actually argue that Wedding Crashers is her at her best. Well, at least in terms of her comedic work. Crazy as it sounds, filming for Mean Girls wrapped up in November of 2003, and filming for Wedding Crashers started in March of 2004. McAdams made both movies basically back-to-back, which is just weird to think about considering in one movie she plays a high school junior and in the other she plays a person old enough to be the romantic foil for Owen Wilson (in his mid-30s at the time). McAdams created a real character in Wedding Crashers, which I think gives the movie an element that a lot of other raunchy made-for-dudes comedies don’t. A lot of the time, the female leads are just eye-candy, or are intentionally one-dimensional. I’d argue that Isla Fisher’s character actually fits that bill pretty well — she seems closer to a cartoon character than a real person. But McAdams actually plays Claire in a way that you can actually see her doubts and worries and hopes and motivations. On the list of truly dynamic supporting female characters in comedy movies (granted, a rather specific category, but it’s where we are), McAdams is on a short list, along with Mila Kunis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Emma Stone in Superbad, and like, that’s kind of it. I’m sure there are others, but none are really jumping out in my mind, which is kind of the point.

For as great as Vaughn and Wilson and McAdams are in the movie, the actor that always stands out to me is Bradley Cooper. This really was Cooper’s breakout role. His first ever film performance was in Wet Hot American Summer, a phenomenal movie that has become a cult classic, but nobody saw it at the time. It wasn’t until 2005 that he became a known actor, and it really wasn’t until The Hangover in 2009 that he became a household name. His start came in some of the most famous and successful comedies of the decade, but it wasn’t too long before he was cranking out movies with David O. Russell and Clint Eastwood and getting nominated for Oscars. If you had told me in 2005 that two actors from Wedding Crashers would go on to be nominated for Oscars, I’m not sure how many guesses I would need before I landed on Cooper and McAdams. Considering Christopher Walken had already been nominated for two (winning for The Deer Hunter in 1978), I probably would have guessed him in combination with every other actor in the movie before I moved on to anyone else.

I’d be lying if I said my general love for and desire to crash weddings wasn’t a big part of the reason I love this movie. I love weddings. I get to dress up in nice clothes and drink free booze. You tell me which part of this I’m not supposed to enjoy. I wish I could go to weddings all the time, but I don’t know enough people. So I want to crash a few. And it’s not even like I want to go to hook up with girls. I just want the free food and drinks. Wedding Crashers is right up there on the list of movies that I love not only because they’re good movies, but because they put me in a world that I, Jeremy, would very much want to spend time in.

All of the rules of wedding crashing mentioned in the movie were improvised (duh), and, according to a line from Vince Vaughn late in the movie, there’s apparently as many as 115 of them. Obviously, we’re in the age of the internet, so of course some dude or group of dudes took the liberty of writing down all 115. Some are expressly stated in the movie, but most are inferred. Granted, most are stupid. But did I take a few minutes to try to find all of them and then actually read all of them? Of course I did.

Wedding Crashers isn’t nearly as funny as it was when I first saw it, but there are still a few scenes that elicit some hearty laughs out of me. Most of them involve Vince Vaughn in various states of anger or incredulity, or Christopher Walken just generally being Christopher Walken. There was a point in my life that Wedding Crashers may have been my favorite comedy (or at least damn close), but it’s faded over the years. On the current list, I have it ranked as my 9th-favorite comedy, which is nothing to sneeze at.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring