Rated R For Crude And Sexual Content, Language Throughout, Some Drug Use And Brief Graphic Nudity.
1hr 41min/101min.
72 F-bombs.
0.5/4 Stars
The only saving grace "The Wedding Ringer" has going for it, is that every once in a while, the usually reliable Kevin Hart will have a passing comment that makes one titter a bit. After that, what you have is 101 minutes of absolute deplorable garbage to the Nth degree. The question of how a movie like this can get made and distributed now, needn't be asked. I know the exact reason: January. January is a wasteland for new movies, the wasteland where Hollywood releases movies that they don't have a lot of faith in. However, Sony was really pushing "The Wedding Ringer", making it seem as if it was a wonderful medley of laughs with Kevin Hart and Josh Gad. Only problem, the movie tries way too hard, yet not hard enough at the same time. By the time Josh Gad gets his genitals bitten by a dog in a bachelor party gone wrong, well, not only has the movie given up, so has the viewer.
Doug Harris(Josh Gad) is a poor old sap. Never having any true friends throughout his entire life, he's put in a hot situation when he has to find a best man and seven groomsmen within ten days. Feeling desperate, he hires Jimmy Callahan(Kevin Hart) of The Best Man Inc. to be his best man. Jimmy makes a living pretending to be guys' best friends for people who never had any. Since Doug is a special case, Jimmy decides to pull off the Gold Tux package for the first time, going all out to make sure that not even a single seam is torn in this entire operation. Now going under the name of Bic Mitchum, Jimmy has to keep this "daunting" secret away from Doug's fiance's Gretchen(Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting) and her entire family.
The "jokes" in this movie are really made for people who secretly laugh at despicable things in private who can finally go out to a public theater and laugh their little heads off. The scene where the bridesmaids get together to sing a rendition of "Lean On Me" by Bill Withers is painful to sit through because it feels so forced, it's unbelievable. People can now guffaw comfortably at an old woman being set ablaze for no reason! But, why stop there? Let's throw in an incredibly homophobic character in the vein of Gretchen's father who things of everything as frilly if it doesn't go his way. You like jokes about pedophilia, statutory rape and non-stop discontent for women everywhere? No problem! You, my fellow reader, are just as bad as the movie itself!
Kevin Hart(2014's "Top Five") has gone on record as saying that he feels that this is his absolute best work so far and best represents his on-stage stand-up. If that's the case, and it isn't, then he must be really boring and desperate onstage. Hart is a wonderful comedian and has made plenty of movies that have made me laugh such as 2014's "Ride Along" and 2015's "Get Hard", but this is just desperation if there ever was one. Josh Gad(2013's "Frozen") is simply here to be socially awkward and provide chuckles simply because the guy who voices Olaf(the very adorable snow man, by the way) is spouting obscenities from time to time. Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting(TV's "The Big Bang Theory") is the worst of the main lineup. Not having much screen-time(understandable since she's not the main focus) she doesn't seem all that interested in having Doug as a lifelong partner. By the end, she's completely despicable, making the audience wish she would never do another role again. 
"The Wedding Ringer" tries to pull at the audience's heart-strings within the final ten minutes, but by then, who cares? I know, I don't. The movie doesn't have a soul even if it came out and wore a sign that proclaimed it. Unfunny, unbelievably and unequivocally pandering to the very lowest common denominator, "The Wedding Ringer" will soon be found within the depth's of the $5 dump bin at all Walmart's across America. For right now though, it resides in the depth's of cinematic hell, the place reserved for movies designed to make people absolutely loathe them for their entire existence. 
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