Wedding Crashers Made $285 Million. It's a Con Job Where the Mark Marries the Con

Wedding Crashers came out in July 2005, cost about $40 million and made around $285 million worldwide. Critics liked it fine, 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, and audiences gave it an A- on CinemaScore, which is the grade a child gets for a macaroni portrait: everyone's proud, nobody looks too close.

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play John and Jeremy, divorce mediators who spend wedding season sneaking into receptions under fake names with fake backstories, to sleep with guests and leave by brunch. They have rules for it. Rules are what men write down when they want a crime to feel like a hobby.

The big score is the wedding of the daughter of Christopher Walken's Treasury Secretary. John falls for her sister Claire, played by Rachel McAdams, who is engaged to a smug jock played by Bradley Cooper. To get closer to her, John keeps lying, for an entire weekend at the family compound, in a fake identity, and the movie asks us to root for it because Cooper is meaner. That's the moral math of the whole film: you're allowed to deceive a woman as long as there's a worse man in the room. By that standard, every con man in history was a romantic lead.

Meanwhile Jeremy gets the subplot that's aged like egg salad in a glove box. Isla Fisher's Gloria is played for laughs as a clingy, unhinged virgin who ties him to a bed. Her brother Todd, a gay artist, creeps into Jeremy's room at night, and the joke is that a gay man is the scariest thing in the house. Swap the genders on either gag and the film turns into a deposition. Fisher, to her credit, is so fast and strange she nearly redeems it. Nearly.

Then Will Ferrell shows up as Chazz, the legend of crashing, who lives with his mother and has moved on to funerals. It's the best five minutes in the film, and that's a problem, because it's also the movie admitting what it's about. Chazz is just John and Jeremy without the cheekbones. Nobody's marrying him.

The last act piles on the apologies, the chase to the church, the speech, and the ending lets everyone off easy. John gets the girl. Jeremy gets Gloria, and seems happy about it, which the movie treats as a punchline instead of a hostage situation. Vaughn's motor-mouth is genuinely great, and Walken saying grace could sell a cemetery plot. But a romance built on a lie isn't sweet just because the music swells.

It's a funny movie about two liars who get rewarded for lying, released in a summer when that still read as a fantasy. Now it reads like the news. The surest way to marry into money, it turns out, is the same as the surest way to get into the White House: show up uninvited, smile and never use your real name.