There’s a strange phenomenon we noticed with certain types of movies. Movies that, let’s say, don’t give a reviewer a lot to chew on, intellectually. In these circumstances, those reviewers have a tendency to just describe the action they see on screen, as presumably they’ve deemed deep analysis unnecessary. We’ve found that we can make a sort of collage out of those reviews, revealing a description of the film in its entirety, with the result often more entertaining than the film itself.
This week: The Wedding Ringer, starring Kevin Hart and Josh Gad. A movie about which saying anything more than “it’s Hitch meets I Love You, Man” seems to have been redundant. Nonetheless, I chose it because I’d heard Josh Gad gets a blowjob from a dog. Sadly, it seems every publication whiffed on the obvious headline: “Something Blew.”
Josh Gad plays Doug, a schlubby, well-to-do tax attorney who’s due to be married to lovely but potentially Bridezilla-ish Gretchen (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting). (Vulture)
Doug readily admits she’s out of his league. She seems to agree, as does Ed (Ken Howard), her domineering dad. End of story. (LA Times)
Doug is a prickly blend of loser and loner (LA Times)
a nerdy guy (Toronto Sun)
a sweaty beta male (NY Post)
gratifyingly ordinary (NY Times)
a schleppy (BadassDigest)
awkward friendless dweeb (AV Club)
soft-spoken and overweight. (Hollywood Reporter)
A pre-credits gag about him being so fat he shatters the desk he sits on. (Village Voice)
This spineless pile of goo doesn’t have a single male friend or relative to serve as his best man, or as a groomsman, for his wedding in 10 days. He’s that lacking in charisma. (The Dissolve)
The bride is clearly supposed to be the villain. (LATimes)
A controlling shrew just biding her time until she can reveal her true motives and personality (TheDissolve)
the kind of hot babe who’d have looked right through him in high school. (Toronto Sun)
She forces Doug to attend salad dressing tastings and insists that their first dance be to the song she and her ex shared on a night of blissful lovemaking. (Badass Digest)
Like most women, she’s kind of evil, and cannot be trusted. (The Dissolve)
While Gretchen is obsessing over salad dressing flavors (and is generally depicted in stereotypically controlling, materialistic fashion), Doug is trying to hide from her and their flamboyant wedding planner, Edmundo (Ignacio Serricchio), an over-the-top gay queen. (RogerEbert, Grantland)
a mincing gay stereotype. (Variety)
Doug has fewer friends than he has let on to her. (Grantland)
He not only needs a best man, he actually needs friends in general. (Vulture)
On a tip from Edmundo, Doug pays a visit Hart’s Jimmy Callahan, a best man for hire. (RogerEbert)
He works out of a basement room at the back of a carnival, the locale providing a surreal and slightly wacky backdrop of batting cages and bumper cars. (LA Times)
Hart talks fast and has an answer for everything — he rattles off different best-man package options like “Basic Single Ring Wingman” and “The Bronze Bow Tie” like they were familiar menu items — but what Doug is asking for is mythical, nearly impossible — “The Golden Tux,” a best man and an entire set of groomsmen. (Vulture)
For $50,000 (plus expenses), Jimmy promises Doug the wedding of his dreams. (Grantland, LA Times)
Doug and Jimmy set about auditioning a bunch of Jimmy’s go-to guys to be Doug’s set of bros. (Vulture)
The short notice means the groomsmen are largely idiots and weirdos (Grantland)
that look like “the cast of ‘Goonies’ grew up and became rapists,” (Detroit News)
in it for both the money and for the potential of hooking up with bridesmaids. (“I want seven vaginas in my face!” one of them demands.) (Vulture)
The Asian American one has a third testicle. Another’s a white, sleazed-up ex-con (Colin Kane) who preys on women and has raped men. (Grantland)
The one guy with model-good looks has a speech impediment. (NY Post)
The really fat guy is really fat, was also Hurley on Lost. (Complex)
Doug is appalled, but maybe these misfits (and criminals) are the bros he’s always wanted. (Grantland)
Gretchen never notices that the placeholder names he gives her include Drysdale, Carew, Rambis, Plunkett and Dickerson. Because women don’t like sports, silly! (RogerEbert)
In between teaching Doug how to be a man, Jimmy has to portray a military priest named “Bic Mitchum” (NYDailyNews)
named after random objects in Doug’s medicine cabinet. (NY Post)
Jimmy throws him the creepiest bachelor party ever filmed. (Grantland, Badass Digest)
Doug meets an agreeable sex worker. (Badass Digest)
The get-to-know-you brunch with the bride’s family ends with Grandma (poor Cloris Leachman) getting set on fire. (NY Post)
Lots of gags about prison rape and stuttering (NY Post)
child molestation (Hollywood Reporter)
noisy party scenes, sequences that appear to have been edited with a Vitamix,
a pointless car chase (AV Club)
all manner of random, highly exaggerated comic violence (Variety)
a boy getting hit in the gut with a baseball and a man breaking his own arm for show. (Hollywood Reporter)
There’s this party and a hooker and a dog… (Toronto Sun)
a faux-Russian stripper who smears peanut butter on Doug’s junk. (ComingSoon)
Doug gets an intimate tongue bath (NY Post)
the term “service dog” is given stomach-turning new meaning (Hollywood Reporter)
and a basset hound comes down with lockjaw while licking Gad’s penis. (Grantland)
Too filthy for the R rating, the film haplessly suggests the act and its vague complications. (Village Voice)
Meanwhile, Jimmy meets the bride’s family, whose patriarch (Ken Howard) is introduced delivering this bon mot: “Does anyone else feel really f*cking gay right now?” His skin is crawling, you see, because of the proximity of the bride’s flamboyant wedding planner, who is clearly a fan of balls, but not in the right way. (NY Post)
Doug’s coarse, macho future father-in-law challenges Doug’s masculinity by assembling a football team that includes Ed “Too Tall” Jones and a mad-dog Joe Namath. (Grantland)
After getting creamed by the old guys, Jimmy rallies the ersatz groomsmen to fight back. (The Wrap)
The more Doug hangs with the guys, the more he likes them. (LA Times)
Each time they have a moment, Jimmy has to redraw a professional line the way Julia Roberts kept telling Richard Gere she doesn’t kiss johns on the mouth. (Grantland)
There’s a scene where the two men attend another wedding so Jimmy can teach Doug to dance, but it turns out that Doug took twelve years of dance as a kid, and he’s great. (Badass Digest)
Gad gets to put his showmanship on display in a truly inspired dance sequence with Hart. It’s the highlight of the entire movie. (RogerEbert)
In a weird counterweight to the many gay slurs, this couple lights up the screen as they tango. (NY Post)
Gad’s silly, self-deprecating slowness, (LA Times)
fearlessly throwing his body around (San Francisco Chronicle)
it’s fun to see the heavy-set Gad dipping the diminutive Hart on the dance floor. (Variety)
Hart and Gad are holding each other on the dance floor, reclined in beach chairs reminiscing gently as water from a swimming pool shimmers over them, or tongue-tied at the mutual intensity of their connection. (Grantland)
Doug and Jimmy trade sob stories. (Doug’s deal: His tax-attorney dad moved all the time, so there were never any opportunities to lay down roots and make friends. Jimmy’s: Despite his seeming self-confidence and alpha-male assurance, he’s ultimately just a lonely, directionless man desperately in need of a friend.) (The Dissolve)
There’s a lot of discussion of why Doug doesn’t have any friends, which in turn prompts Jimmy to do some soul-seeking on his own. He looks down on his customers because he sees them as losers who need a professional transaction in order to have, or pretend to have, any friends. But then again, isn’t he in basically the same situation, a guy who gets paid to pretend to have a life? (Vulture)
The lesson is this: Men have balls. They must have them, or grow them, otherwise they are not men. They are little girls. And little girls are stupid. (NY Post)
Women exist mainly to be ogled, abandoned or immolated, as the situation demands. (Variety)
Gretchen’s a prude and a bitch and when Doug leaves her at the altar to party on their honeymoon with a prostitute named Nadia, we’ve reached our happy ending. (Badass Digest)
The film ends with Jorge Garcia breaking the fourth wall and making a LOST joke. (Badass Digest)
One drawback of this feature is that you rarely get a satisfying ending, what with critics reluctant to spoil a film’s ending and all. That didn’t seem to be an issue in this case. I daresay “the film ends with Jorge Garcia breaking the fourth wall and making a LOST joke” is my new favorite.
Vince Mancini is a writer and comedian living in San Francisco. You can find more of his work on FilmDrunk, the Uproxx network, the Portland Mercury, the East Bay Express, and all over his mom’s refrigerator. Fan FilmDrunk on Facebook, find the latest movie reviews here.