The Big Wedding Reviews
Top CriticBarring a few off-color jokes, though, the movie feels like a Carol Burnett sketch dragged out to feature length.
It's tired and dated with too few laughs to justify the stultifying attempts at drama and the impossible-to-swallow plot contortions.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Looks great, some terrific ingredients, but when you slice it up, what a disappointment.
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| Original Score: 1.5/5
Sarandon, Keaton and De Niro mesh beautifully, fully convincing as a trio of old friends and carting in lots of characterization that would be otherwise lacking in Zackham's rote screenplay.
The Big Wedding is a would-be screwball comedy that forgets to throw in the screws.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Many Hollywood films are founded on privilege, but few are as open and nasty about their racism, misogyny, and homophobia. It's a feel-good movie for people who only comfortable around people who look and act just like them.
The Big Wedding aims low and achieves every aspiration.
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| Original Score: 1/4
I suppose it's always nice to get an invitation but please, this "Wedding"? Send back your regrets.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
It never feels real, and its only saving grace is that it clocks in at a mercifully short 90 minutes, which is just about the amount of time you need to realize you never want to see these characters ever again.
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| Original Score: D-
Sadly, superior talent can propel a movie only so far. Bad scripts beget bad movies, even when four Academy Award winners are involved.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Like many big weddings - a lot of things go wrong and not much goes right.
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| Original Score: 2/5
This movie plays like an episode of "Gilligan's Island" done as straight as an episode of "Lost."
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| Original Score: 1/4
The screenplay is chopped up into smutty sound bites constructed around the notion that casual obscenity delivered by respected actors of a certain age is hilarious. But it's just embarrassing.
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| Original Score: 0/5
A game cast and lots of gamey R-rated shenanigans can't compensate for the silly comic contrivances that dominate The Big Wedding.
It might take a glass of champagne or two to get through The Big Wedding.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The film isn't so much funny as it is merely amusing - a laundry list of inappropriate and potentially embarrassing moments that strive mightily, but never quite manage to land the laugh.
The quiet moments feel just as contrived as the manic flailing that repeatedly sends characters tumbling into swimming pools and other bodies of water.
An ensemble comedy with a tonal cluelessness as surprising as the name cast that signed on for it anyway.
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| Original Score: 1/4
"I'd rather gouge my eyes out with hot spoons!'' De Niro exclaims at one point. I'm not sure exactly what he was talking about, but I'd like to think it referred to the prospect of being forced to watch "The Big Wedding.''
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| Original Score: 0/4
In order to pull off this sort of business, the pace should be breakneck, there shouldn't be an extra second to contemplate the moral lapses and betrayals. Alas, The Big Wedding, which inches along like a stoned snail, gives us all the time in the world.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Movie-family weddings are like real ones. Some faces are welcome, some you dread and others have had work done. But they all get tiresome quickly.
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| Original Score: 1/5
There is only one thing to do when you set up a comic machine that doesn't fire -- and that's to go sentimental. But if everybody is behaving like a stock comic type, that's not going to work, either.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This is an American movie trying, strenuously, to "swing" a little. The slapstick is broad and generally awkward.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The movie is bland hackwork; its crime isn't incompetence, but indifference.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
A film without any true concept of what it's trying to accomplish.
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| Original Score: 5.5/10
