You Are Cordially Invited (Stoller, 2025)

You Are Cordially Invited strives to find comedy somewhere outside of sitcom misunderstandings. It finds a little in farce — wrestling an alligator — but not enough to differentiate itself from romcoms-by-the number.

Jim (Will Ferrell) is a widower who wants his daughter to be married at the same island resort where he and his wife tied the knot. Margot (Reese Witherspoon) wants to give her newly engaged sibling the perfect wedding at the same spot? When a stroke of misfortune causes the wedding to get double booked, two control freaks must battle with one another while working through their respective family issues.

Is there any doubt that they will both fall for one another and learn some relational lessons by being forced to share the stage? Of course not. But how they get to new insights matters. The practical problem of the script is that once the pair makes the initial compromise to share the space, the reasons for sabotaging one another make them look petty and stupid. It’s a classic example of characters vacillating between understanding/likable and dumb/mean as the needs of the script dictate. Eventually, we know, it will be time for everything to be resolved so they will land on working things out. The third-act sentiment isn’t really earned, though, because the problems they have to overcome are of their own making and persist only because of their inconsistency. Character transformation is hard, especially while keeping it light and funny in comedy, but if the second act of a comedy is not handled well, we don’t feel pleasure at a character’s eventual transformation so much as irritation that it took him or her so long.

If that sounds like a bad review, here’s the thing. Sometimes, particularly in certain genres, the skill of the performers can elevate bad material. Here it does. Stated bluntly, Witherspoon and Farrell are so good, so likable as performers (if not characters) that they make some of the clunkier parts of the script go down palatably. This is what star power looks like, and while I might wish it were put to better use, it’s hard to deny that these are two genuinely skilled performers at the peak of their profession. The weaker script needs them to lean heavily on their personal charisma and damn if they don’t deliver.

And not to enrage the Internet, but it feels like Farrell has some similarities to Robin Williams. He’s actually better when the zaniness is toned down a bit or offset by other human emotions. The film seems to think what we want to see is some sketch comedy–like the father/daughter duet of “Islands in the Stream” — when the film’s actual best moments are the human ones: Jim teaching Margot how to remember her cousins’ names; Margot having a late-night encounter with Jim’s daughter. Writer/director Nicholas Stoller is capable of mixing funny with sweet (he wrote two Muppet movies for gosh sakes!). I don’t know if he doesn’t trust his own instincts or if the studios pressure him to lean more on farce and formula. Either way, there’s a good movie hiding somewhere inside this commercial shell of an adequate movie that probably would have made a less hysterical trailer but might actually have stood out from among the sea of streaming choices.