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Friday, January 23, 2015

MOVIE REVIEW The Wedding Ringer
 A Running A Show Of Wedding Toasts

Kevin Hart as Jimmy and Josh Gad as Doug in "The Wedding Ringer", Jeremy Garelick's comedy.  Sony/Screen Gems
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Friday, January 23, 2015

 Hollow, "The Wedding Ringer" derives howls of laughter from low-hanging fruit.  The targets are so simplistic and base that you can spot them a mile away.  Jeremy Garelick's comedy about a travelling best man businessman (Kevin Hart) and his man makeover (Josh Gad) is gleefully offensive.  Almost as offensive as the 20-something white male who accosted me minutes before this film to say, "did you know there was a chicken wing special on right now?"  No joke.  That really happened to me in San Francisco last week.

Kevin Hart is Jimmy.  He turns low-confidence guys into superstars.  Jimmy wants no friends or attachments.  His next assignment is Doug (Mr. Gad), a good guy klutz who's marrying Gretchen (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting), who reveals herself late on and transparently, as a stereotype of some women.  Somewhere, in this lazy mess, is a movie.  But I tried to find the movie but had to swim through and endure a morass of bottom-feeding, juvenile comments and male stupidity, constant references and put-downs of women and denigrations of women overall.  I couldn't find it.

The amount of times "don't be a girl" and "don't be a pussy" were used by both sexes -- reinforcing an anti-woman, anti-female and rigorously anti-gender atmosphere -- permeated the vacant, depressed feeling and residue "The Wedding Ringer" left within me.  At some point this is not comedy.  It's dangerous.  And a movie isn't "only a movie."  Movies are very often an invitation to reinforce harmful societal beliefs, behaviors and attitudes that re-oppress those in the categories of oppression, in this case, women.  And such opportunities are even more dangerous when cheerfully reinforced under the guise of "comedy". 

Mr. Garelick's film traffics in misogyny, homophobia and mean-spiritedness.  Repetitive and useless, "The Wedding Ringer" is a relentless assault of baseness and bottomless "humor".  How convenient is it that Jimmy, also known as Bic, who pretends to be a priest, devises a plan to be from North Dakota to fool one of Gretchen's relatives -- only to find out that her relative is from North Dakota?  How stunningly original.  Later, one of the "rapists" Jimmy has recruited to "fool" Gretchen -- made to look dumber than she is despite her intuition -- lies and says he went to Harvard and is a doctor.  Just so happens that a woman one "rapist" is lying to went to Harvard and is the same type of doctor.  Perfect.

An axiom is that comedy comes from pain.  This kind of comedy is flat out painful.  This is what Hollywood loves to make.  And it makes money.  That's why it continues. And that's on us.  When, and if, Hollywood film male-bonding comedies no longer make money, hopefully a "Ringer" like this will be dead, and not duplicated -- ever again.

Also with: Jenifer Lewis, Mimi Rogers, Cloris Leachman, Affion Crockett, Jorge Garcia, Dan Gill.

"The Wedding Ringer" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for crude and sexual content, language throughout, some drug use and brief graphic nudity.  Its running time is one hour and 34 minutes.
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