Film Review: Kevin Hart Takes a Plunge in ‘The Wedding Ringer’

Submitted by PatrickMcD on January 16, 2015 - 12:12pm

CHICAGO – “The Wedding Ringer” is a Wedding Stinker. It’s a misogynistic trip through a barren land of hackneyed premises, stock characters, female stereotypes and strained physical gags that exemplifies everything that is wrong with big studio comedies today. The sheer fact that it even lunges out of the starting gate is a credit to the whirlwind of activity from star Kevin Hart. But the little man’s riffing can’t shock this film to life.

Rating: 1.0/5.0

Hart plays Jimmy - a professional best man for hire. He’ll give you the best man of your dreams for a very lucrative price. He’s apparently very successful – despite the fact his business is run out of a basement inside a run-down go-cart track. It’s really just another character that allows for Hart to run his mouth off. In one of the hoariest plot devices to come out of the old Hollywood script-o-matic, sad sack groom (Josh Gad) comes to Hart in desperation. He needs a best man and seven groomsmen in time for his wedding in 11 days. After much hemming and hawing Hart takes on the challenge. Why? Because we wouldn’t have a movie if he didn’t, that’s why.

Josh Gad may be gifted a Broadway performer but he’s unable to lend any humanity to his shapeless blob of a character. Hart is supposed to be part time mentor and professional best man, with Gad as the eager pupil But he provides so little in his scenes with Hart, you could replace him with a cardboard cutout and probably not tell the difference. “The Big Bang Theory’s” Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting plays Gad’s bride-to-be, and she’s locked into the regressive stereotype of the money-grubbing bridezilla who has to have everything just so. Yet somehow we’re asked to accept she would wait until ten days before her wedding to even get to meet any of her husbands groomsmen – or best man.

“The Wedding Ringer” opens everywhere on January 16th. Featuring Kevin Hart, Josh Gad, Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, Olivia Thirlby, Josh Peck, Mimi Rogers and Cloris Leachman. Written and directed by Jeremy Garelick. Rated “R”