Wedding Crashers is a 2005 comedy directed by David Dobkin, written by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, and starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as John Beckwith and Jeremy Grey, two Washington lawyers who spend their summers crashing strangers' weddings in order to pick up women. Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher play the Cleary sisters, Claire and Gloria, with Bradley Cooper as Claire's appalling boyfriend Sack Lodge, Christopher Walken as their father, Jane Seymour as their mother, and an uncredited Will Ferrell as Chazz Reinhold. It was released on 15 July 2005, which means it is now twenty-one years old, and if it were a person it could legally buy itself a drink in America. I am not emotionally prepared for that and I suspect neither are you.

I should also admit that I think I missed the boat on this one entirely, and that I arrive carrying a bias I cannot defend.

That bias is Vince Vaughn. I have a completely irrational disdain for the man, to the point where I actively avoid films he appears in. It is not a considered critical position and I am not going to pretend otherwise. There are exceptions, and Dodgeball is the significant one, which is notable given it arrived the year before this. In roughly eighteen months he made the only two films of his that I will actively defend, and then, as far as I am concerned, he went home.

What genuinely works here is the supporting cast, and in particular the two performers this film launched.

Isla Fisher is the standout. She plays Gloria as someone operating several rooms away from stable, and she commits so completely that it becomes genuinely funny rather than merely broad. It is a fearless comic performance, and it is worth noting that she is Australian, had come up through Home and Away, and was largely unknown internationally before this. Wedding Crashers is the film that made her a name.

Bradley Cooper is the other. His Sack Lodge is one of the great punchable screen antagonists, an entitled, sneering, casually cruel man, and Cooper plays him so convincingly that I finished the film with quiet concerns about how much of it was acting. He too was largely a television actor beforehand, and this is the role that opened the door for everything that followed.

Rachel McAdams is excellent, which is neither surprising nor interesting to report, because she has been excellent in absolutely everything she has ever appeared in.

And I will admit to taking a personal and disproportionate amount of pleasure from the sequence in which Vaughn's character is shot in the backside during the hunting trip. It is funny in its own right. It was funnier to me specifically.