59Wedding Crashers (2005)

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are a pair of rapscallion divorce lawyers who crash weddings for sex, until they meet their match at the blue-blooded nuptials for a daughter of the U.S. Treasury Secretary. The film has something of a sweet, romantic comedy structure – the will-they-or-won’t-they pas de deux between Wilson and Rachel McAdams – but co-screenwriters Steve Faber and Bob Fisher meant to shake up that genre with a ribald script that harkened back to their influences, including the unapologetic, R-rated raucousness of Animal House. “Comedy needed to be defibrillated after 9/11,” Faber told Elvis Mitchell on the public radio program The Treatment. But Wedding Crashers had more up its sleeve than a men-behaving badly conceit. Our scam-artist heroes, like countless comedy teams before them, are goofballs in disguise, and behind enemy lines, infiltrating a powerful political family full of repellant characters.