Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon have both been around long enough to have become the movie star equivalent of comfort food. By this point in their respective careers, you know what you’re getting, especially if the project is a comedy, and if you like it, it’ll fill you up for a couple of hours. “You’re Cordially Invited” is reheated comedy leftovers, for the most part, but there’s enough warmth, sentimentality, and belly laughs to make for a raucous timewaster.
Ferrell plays Jim, a widower whose only daughter Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan) breaks the news that she’s just gotten engaged to her boyfriend Oliver (Stoney Blyden). Jim’s life has revolved mainly around Jenni since her mother died, so this is an even bigger deal than it would normally be for a dad. It is decided that the wedding will happen at Palmetto House, a venue on a tiny, remote island where Jim wed Jenni’s mother decades earlier.
Unfortunately, there is, let’s say, a scheduling mess-up, and the wedding ends up getting booked on the same day as the nuptials of another couple, the secretly pregnant Neve (Meredith Hagner) and her exotic dancer fiancé Dixon (Jimmy Tatro). This puts Jim at odds with Neve’s older sister Margot (Witherspoon), a TV executive acting as their family’s wedding planner who came up with the idea of doing the event at Palmetto House because Margot and Neve’s mother and grandmother grew up there.
The hard-driving Margot shuts down Jim’s claim to equal access by pointing out that she put down a credit card and he didn’t, so Jim retreats and devises a pathetic Plan B. “There’s a Wet & Wild Water Park and a Super 8 (motel) about 200 miles from here that will accommodate most of us,” Jim tells Margot, subtly emphasizing “most.” But Margot relents, and the families tries to make the best of an awkward situation in which emotions run high and egos push insecurities into the red zone.
Written and directed by Nicholas Stoller (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Get Him to the Greek”), “You’re Cordially Invited” wants to be a semi-risqué R-rated comedy with f-bombs and cringe comedy (when Jim and Jenni perform “their song” at the rehearsal dinner, it’s “Islands in the Stream,” a lovers’ duet, which is charming to them but no one else) and, at the same time, a heartwarming comedy about parents, children, and extended families in which scenes run long and play a bit on the shaggy side like an independent drama that gives itself permission to marinate in the texture of life.
The two impulses aren’t incompatible, but (sorry!) marrying them requires a degree of finesse that Stoller has managed in the past but only sometimes summons here. Some of the big slapstick set-pieces (like a disaster on a dock) stick the landing, but then the movie will shift gears into a quiet conversation scene, one that’s played sincerely but may not feel that way because the film has trained you to be on your toes for the next absurdist explosion (or bizarre throwaway bit, like the glimpse of a hit game show on Margot’s TV network that’s titled “Is it Dead?”).
The desire to establish early that both Margot and Jim (plus everyone in their extended families) are essentially decent people is another problem, because it lets the air out of the movie’s comedic tires. If it’s been determined in the first part of the story that the families are going to try to work through the misunderstanding, and that only the personalities of the participants will create momentary speed bumps rather than actual obstacles, that means the script has to come up with unconvincing contrivances to conjure tension and keep the shenanigans coming (like Jim overhearing Margot being critical of his parenting and his relationship with Jenni and being driven into a vengeful snit that seems unlike him). The result is a likable movie that feels disjointed or perhaps unfocused, or just at odds with itself. There’s a better movie in here somewhere: one that’s either a lot sweeter or a lot more dangerous.
On Prime Video now.