“You’re Cordially Invited” (2025) is a Dreadful, Mean-Spirited Comedy (Part I of II)
3/10
“You’re Cordially Invited” (2025) is a dreadful movie, but of all the ways in which it fails, none is more off-putting than the cruelty of it all. I felt unclean watching this film, a purportedly light-hearted, romantic comedy.
Jim Caldwell (Will Ferrell) is a single father whose daughter Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan) is getting married. She wants the wedding to take place at Palmetto Island, where her father and deceased mother were married. It’s a small venue where only one wedding can take place during a weekend. When Jim calls the venue, the owner takes the reservation but dies of a heart attack before she can book the reservation in the calendar.
In retrospect, this was the first warning sign: killing an old lady is an inauspicious beginning to a comedic film.
Skip a couple months later and Neve Buckley (Meredith Hagner) announces to her sister, Margot Buckley (Reese Witherspoon), that she’s getting married. She wants the wedding to take place on Palmetto Island because that’s where she and Margot spent their childhood together with their grandmother. Margot is able to reserve the wedding during the same weekend that Jenni Caldwell is getting married because Jim’s reservation was never officially booked.
Neve is pregnant but Margot bad-mouths the rest of her family and advises her sister to not announce the pregnancy to the family. At this point, it’s not clear whether Margot is saying these unpleasant things because the family’s dysfunctional or because she’s spiteful; unpleasantly for the audience, as the movie rolls on, it becomes clear it’s the latter.
When Jim and Margot arrive at the island, they realize that the venue has been double-booked. After some back and forth, they agree to share the island. First, the Caldwells will have the rehearsal dinner outside while the Buckleys will have theirs inside. For the vows on the pier, the Caldwells will have the first half of the sunset while the Buckleys will get the second half.
All of this is a setup for predictable gags, and the film delivers the clichés on cue. When a torrential downpour hits the rehearsal dinner of the rowdy Caldwell wedding, they come inside to crash the subdued Buckley rehearsal banquet. This scene may be hackneyed, but at least it brought some heartwarming moments.
If only the movie kept on hitting the clichés, maybe it could have settled for being a middling movie with periodic laughs. Instead, writer, director and producer Nicholas Stoller decided to take the movie in a different direction, which results in an important lesson that there’s a lot to be said for clichés when the alternative is mean-spritedness.
(Continued to Part II)
