Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon’s Prime Video Movie is this year’s anyone than you.

Amazon Prime Video Rom-Com You are heartfeltly invited is written and directed by Nicholas Stoller who made some of the more memorable comedies from the 2000s and 2010s, including Forgets Sarah Marshall and the Neighbors film. His new film is also a setback to that era in other ways. It co-stars two of the biggest boxing office drawings of Aughts, Will Ferrell and Reese witherspoon, although each in a role none of them would have taken at the time: Ferrell, because his shambling all-oaf persona borrowed better for wide compassomedies than to hot -hearted romance and witherspoon because she would have been thrown as a maintenance breach 20 years ago, rather than the character’s micro -managing older sister. The idea of ​​bringing together these two titans of Hollywood-visibility veterans, in Ferrell’s case, literally, of the old school-comedy promise. Emphasis on “had”.

Ferrell’s Jim is a single-father widow who has bred his only child, Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan from Blockers And the 2020s Bad education) when she was 6 years old. Their father-daughter connection is so close to becoming an ongoing joke, with the couple immediately short-circuiting any hint of potential conflict with a demonstration of Cooing love. When Jenni announces that she marries her boyfriend (Stony Lead), Jim suppresses his fear of exit by jumping into Superdad mode, and immediately booking them a wedding weekend at Palmetto House, a small hotel on an island in the state of Georgia , where he and his late wife married many years ago. The problem is that the unaware of Jim, the older innkeeper who responds to his phone call, falls dead before she can find a workpower to write her name down — a pitch-dark sight of the kind that this often woody comedy could have used more of.

Witherspoon’s Margot is a more difficult job, a closely wounded reality TV producer in LA, semi-East right from her Atlanta-based family because of a prickly relationship with her condemning mother (Celia Weston). Still, Margot loves his younger sister Neve (Meredith Hagner from Search party and Bad monkey), so when she learns, Neve is both engaged with a muted but worshiping Chippendales dancer (American VandalJimmy Tatro) and secretly pregnant with her child, Margot is determined to go all about planning the perfect wedding for her babysis. Guess what remote Iceland resort she chooses to reserve for the blessed event? That’s right, Palmetto House, where both families converge the first weekend of June for what each party thinks will be a private family collection.

After a certain negotiation with the inn’s anxious manager (an under -utilized Jack McBrayer), the two clans agree to share the limited space by dizzling their planned events so as not to overlap. Shenanigans who unfold over the next few double -booked days must be predictable to anyone who has seen a romantic comedy set in a wedding. At one point, a detailed layered cake goes down to the ground. A collapsed dock will dump dressed for the participants in water. A couple of guests perform a sappy pop song (here, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s land-built duet “Islands in the stream”), which is repeated by the entire role crew during the final credits, just as last year with Natasha Bedingfield’s “unwritten” in the unpleasant yet successful rum-com Someone except you. And while everyone may not end up with exactly the partner they thought they were fate for, the family’s canyons will be healed, long-ended evil will be confused, and at least in this one case live alligators will be fought at the hotel bedroom bed, For reasons that are never quite clear to neither the figures nor the audience.

The best moments in You are heartfeltly invited Come in the middle section when Jim and Margot have dug in their match positions and sworn to one-up each other as organizers of events and as the emotional carers of their respective brides. Even when they work from a less than sparkling script, Ferrell and Witherspoon’s enormous reserves of movie star carism and their common flair to play characters who are as comical self -absorbed as they are sure of their own moral justice, do their bouts of dance floor sparring And top-this wedding bowls really fun. Stoller also understands that no wedding comedy could work without a supportive crew of adorable terrible relatives, so he gives Margot a big family that includes Leanne Morgan as an ever -drunk and horny sister, Rory Scovel as a knuckling brother of everyone, Celia Weston, stealing Every scene, she is in as a hypercritical southern matriarch whose barbed wire exterior hides unexpectedly hides the mother’s warmth.

Unfortunately, You are heartfeltly invited Eventually founders on the same rocky shores as many recent attempts to revive Rome-Com. In its last act, as the intermediate threads of new chaos begin to solve to a that of the newlyweds and their families, Jim and Margot appear something suddenly as romantic partners themselves. While the age distance between the two is not huge – Ferrell 57 is to WHHEHSPOON’s 48 – there is a curious wrong for these two as a couple, especially given their characters as previously established in the film. Jim, we have been shown in the stage after scene, is a surfaced father who badly needs some time on his own to find out who he is. Margot for his side is a happy busy career woman who has never shown any sign of dissatisfaction with her only status. To pair them at the end as Lovebirds, which mutually crowns the same song that was previously used as an example of Jim and his daughter’s quasi-inconvenient codpendent relationship, leaving the viewer with a claustrophobic sense that combingom is the only imaginable happy ending.

What if Jim and Margot had ended up so close, but to burke friends and continue to get each other via text about their respective brides’ running bliss? Or what if they had slept together for a moment of champagne-driven folly, only to realize the next morning that while they may not be a viable long-term battle, would they at least always have that night in Palmetto House? In order for the romantic comedy to continue to evolve as a genre, a result that every movie fan seems to be desired, we need more viable paths for happy-all-time-after than the shakespearic model to marry any character in The last scene. If You are heartfeltly invited If your RSVP and for Die-Harde fans of the genre deserves, maybe it is because of the comic chemistry between its dueling event planners. But have every bickering couple in a wedding-rom-com ends to end up like the figures on top of cake?