5 Great Wedding Movies — and 5 Shaky Ones

Zac Efron, Adam Devine, Aubrey Plaza, and Anna Kendrick are a ferociously funny foursome causing trouble at a family wedding in the new comedy Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, a riotously raunchy shot of matrimonial mayhem. Their hilarious hijinks have us in a vow-swapping mood. So with all due respect to the many beloved hits that didn’t make the cut (from The Philadelphia Story and The Princess Bride to Melancholia and Bridesmaids), we present five of our favorite — and five of our not-so-favorite — films about tying the knot.

GREAT: Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
Toni Collette’s breakout role came in this Australian import about a socially awkward small-town woman who wants to stage a lavish wedding and move out of her provincial burg. It’s madcap fun, thanks largely to the charmingly idiosyncratic Collette (who earned a Golden Globe Best Actress nomination) as an ABBA-loving would-be bride.

NOT-SO-GREAT: Mamma Mia! (2008)
Star power is all well and good, but when making a musical, it helps if your headliners can also actually, you know, sing — a problem ignored, disastrously, by this adaptation of the hit Broadway musical based on the songs of ABBA. Led by Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård — all of whom seem to be engaged in an awful karaoke contest — this gaudy, glitzy affair admittedly has its admirers, but we find it excruciatingly unfunny and can think of dozens of musicals we’d rather endure.

GREAT: Father of the Bride (1991)
A return trip down the aisle (following in the footsteps of its 1950 namesake starring Spencer Tracy), this winning comedy stars Steve Martin as a proud papa who finds it difficult to accept his future son-in-law (George Newbern) and give away his bride-to-be daughter (Kimberly Williams). With Diane Keaton as Martin’s wife, and Martin Short as the family’s flamboyant wedding coordinator, it’s the rare remake to equal its source material.

NOT-SO-GREAT: The Wedding Planner (2001)
No cliché goes unused in this 2001 romantic comedy, in which Jennifer Lopez’s title professional finally finds the man of her dreams in Matthew McConaughey’s hunk — only to discover that he’s getting hitched to her latest client (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras). What follows is by-the-books rom-com fluff of the dreariest sort involving two attractive stars who share zero chemistry.

GREAT: Wedding Crashers (2005)
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are an ideal pair of bros — the former loud and brash, the other bold, but sensitive — in this blockbuster comedy about two men who have mastered the art of attending weddings uninvited. Full of rambunctious energy and sharp one-liners, and featuring a sterling, dark-side-of-stunted-maturity appearance by Will Ferrell, it remains one of the wedding comedy subgenre’s enduring efforts.

NOT-SO-GREAT: Bride Wars (2009)
Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway are two matrimony minded best friends who, through a clerical error, wind up scheduling their nuptials on the same day, at the same location. They then proceed to wage the most immature, intolerable battle in wedding-movie history. It’s the rare film to make you wish everyone would end up miserable and alone.

GREAT: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
The first of screenwriter Richard Curtis’s run of hits featuring Hugh Grant, this rollicking British import — at the time of its release, the highest-grossing film in U.K. history — turned the handsome British actor into Hollywood’s go-to star for romantic comedies, and earned itself an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Charting the amour that blossoms between Grant’s bumbling bachelor and Andie MacDowell’s alluring American (who meet at, you guessed it, four weddings and a funeral), it holds up as a modern classic.

NOT-SO-GREAT: Runaway Bride (1999)
Julia Roberts and Richard Gere shared such A-list chemistry in Pretty Woman that it was inevitable they’d reunite on screen. Unfortunately, it was in this contrived mess involving a woman who keeps ditching fiancés at the altar, and the tabloid newspaperman who falls in love with her on the eve of her fourth marriage. Predictable and leaden at every turn, it proves that Roberts and Gere should have limited their big-screen relationship to a single tryst.

GREAT: The Wedding Banquet (1993)
Ang Lee’s groundbreaking portrait of the push-pull between tradition and modernity follows a gay Taiwanese man (Winston Chao) living in Manhattan with his boyfriend, who agrees to placate his conservative family by marrying a woman. His life gets thrown into disarray when his parents unexpectedly visit to throw him a lavish banquet. Alternately amusing and poignant, this clash of generations and cultures is as moving and relevant today as it was in 1993.

NOT-SO-GREAT: The Bachelor (1999)
Proud bachelor Jimmie (Chris O’Donnell) has one day to find a bride in order to inherit his grandfather’s fortune — a problem compounded by the fact his girlfriend (Renée Zellweger) has just left the country — in this insufferably unfunny tale of a man learning the value of marriage. Forced zaniness abounds in Gary Sinyor’s rom-com, which squanders its lead actress in one of many reductive roles that turn the film into a particularly unpleasant exercise in fantasyland nonsense.

(Photos: Universal Pictures, Everett, Kobal, Paramount/Kobal, Samuel Goldwyn Films)