Wedding Crashers

To call them breasts is to miss the point, and to call them tits is just…wrong. So I’ll go with boobs to describe the naked anatomy on display, however briefly, in Wedding Crashers, an unabashedly jiggly, bawdy, it’s-all-good comedy about a couple of guys who love getting laid. Bare boobs, flashed in good fun in an R-rated comedy without concern for children or politicians or morals police! Ha, not only have the terrorists not won, but the rights of an adult audience to laugh at good jokes about erections have been secured for another summer. Truly, it feels like a long hard time since moviegoers have tasted a piece of this pie, in which guys leer, girls giggle, and no one gets hurt or produces a firearm; it’s been such a dry spell, in fact, that the retro, hetero, ’70s-style raunch of Wedding Crashers feels new again, modernized by the neo-retro-hetero duo of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as champion skirt-chasers. In the scenario written by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, directed by Shanghai Knights’ David Dobkin with relaxed understanding that on-screen chemistry is what happens between dialogue cues, best friends Jeremy (Vaughn) and John (Wilson) love the swordsman’s life so much that the two have made a specialized after-hours career of wangling their way into strangers’ weddings, the better to pick up chicks susceptible to the romance in the air and the champagne in their glasses.

The prologue of this funny, ungirdled romp — a buddy picture about buddies who actually know what women want (and worldly women who know what they want too) — is a montage of past nuptials. Here the boys relive a few of the triumphs at which they successfully united and conquered. A Jewish celebration, followed by Italian and Chinese and Irish wingdings — John and Jeremy know that the way to score in any culture is to look like it’s the last thing on their minds, devoting themselves instead to entertaining the children, schmoozing with the oldies, and showing their vulnerable side to the ladies. Swingin’, hors-d’oeuvres-stuffing, garrulous Vaughn makes expert use of his off-the-cuff, chow-it-down, guy-to-guy solidity and his ability to get the whole room dancing (he’s the first one up for a good hora), while John’s foolproof moves include twirling chastely with little flower girls (Wilson a vision of frosted hair and smarmily sincere gestures) in a way sure to be noticed by nearby compassionate bridesmaids.

The two meet their matches, as they must; every horndog has his day. Crashing the haute Washington, D.C., festivities for a daughter of the U.S. secretary of the treasury (Christopher Walken, the go-to man to play crackpot fathers when Robert De Niro is busy), John falls for one of the bride’s two sisters (Rachel McAdams) while Jeremy is waylaid by the other (Isla Fisher). And the movie becomes a comedy of mixed intentions, culminating in a goofy cameo appearance by a comedian famous for his old-school impersonations, as the long-in-the-tooth swinger who taught Jeremy and John all the intricacies of wedding crashing in the first place.

What the boys learn, of course, is that for mature men, the mating game’s more fun with a partner one cares about the next day. What we learn is that the pairing of Vaughn and Wilson is a success to do a matchmaker proud.