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Film / The Wedding Ringer

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The Wedding Ringer is a 2015 comedy from writer/director Jeremy Garelick. It stars Kevin Hart, Josh Gad, and Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting.

Doug Harris (Gad) is about to get married, but he has no one to be his best man. Out of desperation, he hires Jimmy Callahan (Hart), owner and operator of The Best Man, Inc. With Jimmy's help, he gathers an outrageous selection of guys to be his groomsmen in time for the wedding.


Tropes:

  • Amusing Injuries: Doug gets bitten on the penis by a dog as a prank during his bachelor party and Gretchen's grandmother gets set on fire.
  • Armor-Piercing Question: Doris drops one on Jimmy.
    Doris: But let me ask you this, Jimmy. If you ever found a woman crazy enough to marry you, who would be your best man?\\
  • Becoming the Mask: Doug eventually finds real connection with Jimmy and his groomsmen and has such good times with them that he wants a genuine lasting friendship with them, which he achieves by the end of the film.
  • Berserk Button: One of the men that is chosen for Doug's groomsmen is annoyed to discover that the character he was given is paralysed, especially because he'd be unable to have one-night stands with some of the female wedding guests. This was probably for the better, in the women's expense. The wheelchair character's actor was a convicted rapist.
  • Bestiality Is Depraved: As a prank to Doug during his bachelor party, a dog is tricked into licking peanut butter off his genitals. Unfortunately the dog bites down in Doug, dies of a heart attack and they had to take Doug to a hospital. It's very awkward.
  • Camp Gay: Edmundo (the wedding planner)'s flamboyant personality is just a ruse to exploit for better business. In real life, he's actually a Straight Gay that lives with his boyfriend in a messy house and smokes marijuana.
  • Dancing Royalty: Doug and Jimmy's shameless enthusiastic dancing stun the wedding reception, who clear the floor for the two men to have their duet.
  • Foreshadowing: The movie is littered with this, and eventually comes together very neatly.
    • The relationship between Doug and Gretchen.
      • When Doug tries to arouse Gretchen, she immediately ignores his advances.
      • The wedding song that Gretchen chooses is from the first time that she and Doug had sex. Doug points out that said song was from the time that Gretchen and an ex-boyfriend had had sex; Gretchen has told him this anecdote many times.
      • When Doug is asked what attracted him to Gretchen all he can say is "she talked to me".
    • Doug making the Bic Mitchum character a priest.
  • Friendless Background: What kicks off the whole plot. Doug has no friends he could actually ask to be his best man and hires Jimmy to pretend to be his best man. Jimmy also suffers from this.
  • Gold Digger: Gretchen turns out to be this, though she could be considered a sympathetic example: she claims she got sick and tired of dating only meathead jerks and that she was lucky to find someone "nice" like Doug to settle down with. She doesn't really antagonize Doug or Jimmy, but it's clear she doesn't care for him enough/at all.
  • Groin Attack: Doug has a dog bite down on his crotch because of a peanut butter smear during a party game at his bachelor party.
  • Jerkass: Gretchen's father. He has an implied hatred towards Doug and uses his history of being a football player (whether in university or professionally) to intimidate Doug and his friends. He challenges Doug and "Bic" to a game with the rest of the groomsmen. When the men decline, he threatens them. Also, he showed no remorse when he and his old friends pulverised Doug and his group, and constantly bullies Edmundo when the wedding gets delayed.
  • Lack of Empathy: This applies to both Gretchen and Doug. While Gretchen acknowledges that Doug isn't an "asshole", she explicitly states that she's mainly marrying Doug because she's "sick of dating assholes" rather than showing any particular appreciation for Doug as a person. Doug himself never really cared for Gretchen, he just believed that he was lucky to have landed a girl as pretty as her. Whatever union they had wouldn't have lasted long or well, so it was probably for the best that Doug called it off.
  • Line-of-Sight Name: All of the groomsmen names made up by Doug were based on this. Bic Mitchum came from seeing razors and shaving gel in his medicine cabinet and the rest were all football players whose jerseys hung on the wall. Gretchen notices this later, but Doug is able to cover up the coincidence by claiming that he uses those items out of a sense of brand loyalty.
  • Ms. Fanservice: Nadia, who spends most of her scenes wearing a bikini top and booty shorts.
  • Mr. Fanservice: Kip Weiling. He takes his shirt off and pops his pecs during his audition for Jimmy and his friends.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The men that Jimmy use to portray Doug's old school friends, who are mostly strange men that either loiter around the theme park or friends of Jimmy's friends.
  • Prison Rape: One of the guys Jimmy hired to be a groomsman just got out of prison and, according to Jimmy, he raped a lot of guys in there.
  • Ship Tease: Between Doug and the stripper Nadia.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Spanner in the Works: The plan hits a snag on the wedding day when the family priest is replaced by a priest who was Jimmy's high school principal, forcing the "groomsmen" to kidnap the priest as otherwise he will expose "Bic" as a fake.
  • Throwing Out the Script: A best man does this at a wedding that Jimmy and Doug go to, with Jimmy mentioning that it's a terrible idea. He immediately loses his place, forgets what he wanted to say and, somehow, ends up invoking Godwin's Law.

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