Wedding Crashers

This topic contains:

• overall comments and recommendations
• details about Wedding Crashers' classification and consumer advice lines
• a review of Wedding Crashers completed by Young Media Australia (YMA) on 8 August 2005.

Overall comments and recommendations

Wedding Crashers is a buddy movie / romantic comedy following the escapades of two friends who crash weddings to pick up women. Although the set up of the central story seems overlong, the adult audience may enjoy the slapstick and ‘gross out’ comedy from this point. The main characters become more likeable as the movie progresses and overall, the acting is entertaining. The mix of romance into a comedy about weddings strangely doesn’t meld well at times, and some plot lines come from and go nowhere.

About the movie

This section contains details about the movie, including its classification by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) and the associated consumer advice lines.

YMA review

This review of the movie Wedding Crashers contains the following information:

• a synopsis of the story
• use of violence
• material that may scare children
• sexual references
• nudity and sexual activity
• use of substances
• coarse language
• the movie's message

A synopsis of the story

John Beckwith (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy Grey (Vince Vaughn) are long time friends who are partners in a divorce mediation business. They are also partners in their chosen sport, wedding crashing, through which they crash weddings using different names and back stories, as the means to pick up girls. John is wearying of these meaningless flings, but attends one last wedding to back up Jeremy.

The wedding is for Senator William Cleary’s (Christopher Walken) and Mrs Cleary’s (Jane Seymour) eldest daughter. As is their usual practice, John and Jeremy target two women at the wedding, and on this occasion, they are the Senator’s other daughters, Claire (Rachel McAdams) and Gloria (Isla Fischer) respectively. While Jeremy encounters no difficulties seducing Gloria, he finds he then can’t get rid of her. John, on the other hand, is seriously attracted to Claire, but his attempts to flirt with her are thwarted by the presence of her arrogant boyfriend, Sack Lodge (Bradley Cooper). Through Gloria’s ‘tantrums’ and demanding efforts, the guys are invited the join post-wedding celebrations at the Senator’s coastal home. Here they meet the rest of the Cleary family, including the Senators’ artist son, Todd (Keir O’Donnell), Grandma Mary (Ellen Albertini Dow) and Father O’Neill (Henry Gibson).

The boys spend the weekend staving off the unwelcome attentions from some members of the Cleary family and the increasingly suspicious Sack, while attempting to help John find time alone with Claire. As time passes, they realise not only that they are falling in love, but that they are going to get found out and will need to rely on their friendship to get them through.

Use of violence

Research shows that children are at risk of learning that violence is an acceptable means of conflict resolution when violence is glamourised, performed by an attractive hero, successful, has few real life consequences, is set in a comic context and / or is mostly perpetrated by male characters with female victims, or by one race against another.

Repeated exposure to violent content can reinforce the message that violence is an acceptable means of conflict resolution. Repeated exposure also increases the risks that children will become desensitised to the use of violence in real life or develop an exaggerated view about the prevalence and likelihood of violence in their own world.

There are a few scenes containing violence, usually for comic effect, including:

• during a ‘friendly’ family football game, Sack tackles Jeremy twice, leaving him in pain, winded and with cuts on his leg.
  
• while dressing Jeremy’s wounds, Gloria gets angry with him and starts hitting his injured leg and then throwing antiseptic into the wounds.
  
• Jeremy gets shot in the buttock by Sack using an air-rifle.
  
• in a later scene at a restaurant, Sack and his friends drag John outside and punch and kick him repeatedly.
  
• Jeremy punches Sack at a wedding

Material that may scare children

Under eight

Children under eight are most likely to be frightened by scary visual images, such as monsters, physical transformations, the death of a parent or child abandoned or separated from parents, children or animals being hurt or threatened and / or natural disasters.

There is one scene in which the men go hunting for quail, however no dead animals are seen. It is during this scene that Jeremy gets shot in the buttock by Sack.

Aged eight to thirteen

Children aged eight to thirteen are most likely to be frightened by realistic threats and dangers, violence or threat of violence and / or stories in which children are hurt or threatened.

There is nothing in this movie that would scare children over the age of eight.

Sexual references

This movie contains frequent sexual references, including:

• a client in mediation tells her husband to go and meet his whore in Denver, and ‘get inside Chastity’.
  
• Jeremy suggests to the same client that a sweaty Latin guy should ‘take her’, and that she should ‘go outside, get some strange ass’.
  
• at a wedding, Jeremy catches a girl’s eye and states “She eye-fucked the shit out of me”.
  
• after a boat trip, Gloria and Jeremy emerge from downstairs and Jeremy reports that he doesn’t have any bodily fluids left.
  
• Grandma Mary refers to someone as a lesbian ‘rug muncher’.
  
• Jeremy talks to a family preacher about his exploits with Gloria.

Nudity and sexual activity

There are a number of scenes with nudity / sexual activity, including:

• during all the wedding crashing scenes at the beginning of the movie, John and Jeremy are shown to end up in bed with many girls, many of whom are topless. Non-graphic and brief sex scenes are shown.
  
• Gloria grabs Jeremy’s penis during a Cleary family dinner.
  
• Mrs Cleary visits John in his room and exposes her newly enhanced breasts to him. She insists he feel them, which he reluctantly does.
  
• Jeremy wakes up in the night tied and gagged to his bed and Gloria seduces him. She rubs his face with her breasts to wake him up.
  
• Later the Senator’s son Todd also attempts to seduce Jeremy, without success.

Use of substances

There is frequent use of substances in the movie, including:

• during the wedding scenes, many characters are drinking alcohol, and clearly John and Jeremy become intoxicated.
  
• throughout the movie, social occasions are accompanied by the drinking of alcohol (beer, spirits, champagne and wine)
  
• Mrs Cleary, in particular , is depicted as having a drinking problem.
  
• at his daughter’s wedding, Senator Cleary invites John to join him for a cigar on the deck.
  
• at the start of the movie, one of John and Jeremy’s mediation client’s pulls out a bottle of pills when proceedings get agitated.

Coarse language

There is frequent coarse language throughout this movie, particularly used by the younger male characters. Examples include:

• shit
  
• bullshit
  
• shitfit
  
• fuck
  
• fucking
  
• bitch
  
• son of a bitch
  
• ass
  
• God damn you.

The movie's message

The movie’s main message relates to the importance of relationships, including friendship, and that true relationships are more than just a physical connections or good times.

Values parents may wish to encourage are:

• friendship
  
• loyalty
  
• attempting to be honourable.
  
• persistence through adversity or disappointment
  
• growing up and taking responsibility for ones actions.

Parents could take the opportunity to discuss with their older teenagers what their own family’s values are, and what the real life consequences can be of some actions and attitudes such as:

• casual sexual behaviour
  
• making a sport of conning vulnerable people
  
• lying and cheating to get your way
  
• name calling and bullying
  
• throwing tantrums
  
• being unfaithful to one’s partner.