You're Cordially Invited
There's a concept at the heart of You're Cordially Invited which could have produced an okay film. This is not that film. Through the first, of many, contrivances, two families book the same small wedding venue on the same weekend. Oddly, it's neither the bride nor groom of either side as the main characters but the father (Will Ferrell) of one of the brides (Geraldine Viswanathan) and the sister (Reese Witherspoon) of the other bride (Meredith Hagner).
While at first agreeing to work together to make the best of a bad situation and share the venue, conflicts arise (mostly through more contrivances rather than reasonable actions by any character) leading to each actively trying to destroy the other wedding (but in mostly lame ways as anything truly bad that happens is always accidental).
The supporting casts of two weddings are there only as plot devices for our main characters providing some reason for their action. Needing to differentiate between the two groups, the Ferrell/Viswanathan is younger, dumber, and questionably hipper with Ferrell being the only real adult present, while the Witherspoon/Hagner wedding is more Southern and has conflicts rooted in Witherspoon's distance from the rest of the family.
This is not The War of the Roses. If the film had allowed the story to remove the bumpers from Ferrell and Witherspoon's characters and allow them to each get far more diabolical and mean then something might have been saved from this half-baked script from writer/director Nicholas Stoller. However, the ill-conceived idea to try and push these characters together romantically by the end of the film despite their on-screen actions, notable age gap, and complete lack of chemistry cuts the legs from the premise from the start by making sure neither ever goes too far. That only allows the movie to try to play off the actions of wacky one-upmanship which will eventually even include a CGI alligator, but many of those jokes simply fall flat.
Watch the trailer- Title: You're Cordially Invited
- IMDb: link
