Movie Review: 'You're Cordially Invited' is Ugly and Unfunny

You’re Cordially Invited

Directed by Nicholas Stoller

Written by Nicholas Stoller

Starring Will Ferrell, Reese Witherspoon, Geraldine Viswanathan

Release Date January 30th, 2025

Published January 31st, 2025

You’re Cordially Invited is an obnoxious movie. This, sadly, has become par for the course for Will Ferrell who has turned obnoxious into his brand ever since he failed to transition from goofy blockbuster star to serious actor in and around 2005 to 2008, give or take. Feeling rejected by critics, Ferrell leaned back into what made him a box office draw, screaming, yelling, flailing, and falling down until perhaps, someone might laugh. It’s a charmless brand of humor that feels desperate to remain relevant.

You’re Cordially Invited proceeds from an ancient, creaky, premise about a pair of wedding parties booked for the same weekend at a venue that can only support one wedding at a time. Ferrell plays Jim, the overbearing father of Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan), a college student who announces rather suddenly that she’s engaged to marry her D.J boyfriend, Oliver (Stony Blyden). Though he’s skeptical that his little girl is ready to be married, he comes around quickly and begins to plan a wedding at the same venue where he’d married Jenni’s late mother.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast from Jim and Jenni, Margot, a high powered reality TV producer has just found out that her little sister, Neve (Meredith Hagner), is engaged to marry her male stripper boyfriend, Dixon (Jimmy Tatro). Like Jim, she’s skeptical but quickly comes around. She immediately leaps into planning the wedding at the place where the two had spent so many summers with their loving grandmother. This happens to be the same venue where Jim has planned his daughter’s wedding and a grave misunderstanding lands the two wedding parties on the same weekend.

With both parties arriving at the same time, the war is on. Margot wins the first round, having actually paid for the venue, something Jim had planned to do upon arrival. However, when Margot finds out that this was the same place where Jim had married his late wife, she comes up with a compromise. They can share the venue by making use of the outdoor space. This compromise however, won’t last as these are terrible people and the movie is about them being horrible to each other and ruining each of the weddings.

You’re Cordially Invited starts off awkwardly with the kind of humor that only Will Ferrell seems to find funny. Ferrell’s Jim is so desperately devoted to his daughter that the opening scenes of the movie are him cleaning his family home and creating elaborate tributes to his love for his daughter. He bakes numerous baked goods and cleans and all the while Ferrell hams it up because, I guess he didn't find what he’s doing funny without him overselling it with a silly look on his face. This is our first impression of this character and Ferrell has already pushed us into the uncanny comedy valley.

The other characters in You’re Cordially Invited are in a different, far more conventional romantic comedy. Then Ferrell blunders into scenes with his over the top antics and the movie loses balance. This is especially apparent when Ferrell shares the screen with Reese Witherspoon, a veteran of the conventional rom-com, who is playing a relatively grounded character. She does little to match Ferrell’s energy, and really who could match whatever it is that Ferrell is doing. This leaves Witherspoon’s Margot to be situationally shrewish and mean-spirited in service of an already mean-spirited plot that centers on people ruining other people’s weddings.

The rest of the cast is also at the mercy of Ferrell’s broad approach to comedy and since no one else is able to be on Ferrell’s level of cringey overacting, You’re Cordially Invited becomes difficult to watch. I couldn’t help but be repelled anytime Ferrell was on screen as he tries desperately to force humor where humor should organically grow from the material. A good example of this is the marketing of the movie which centers on Ferrell wrestling an alligator. The alligator comes out of pretty much nowhere and is never funny in the movie.

What is the alligator joke supposed to be? In the context of the movie, Jim grabbed an alligator out of a nearby lake with the plan to put it in Margot’s hotel room so that it could attack her. However, she returns to her room early and he’s there on her bed holding the alligator and he thinks he has killed it because it stopped moving. It’s not dead however and it begins to flail. The scene devolves into Jim and Margot screaming at each other over how to get rid of the alligator. Margot gets bit by the alligator and that’s it. What was the joke? The yelling and falling down?

That’s You’re Cordially Invited in a nutshell. It’s a series of ideas in search of a punchline that never arrives. Then, in the final act, after they’ve had no chemistry or build toward even tolerating each other, the movie pivots to have Margot and Jim fall for each other. I’ve seen a few unconvincing romantic partners in movies but Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell are perhaps the most unconvincing romantic partners I’ve ever seen. It’s not about Witherspoon being more attractive than Ferrell. It’s about how she's playing a relative approximation of a human being and Ferrell is playing a man as a series of unfunny sketches.

I fear that I am coming off as a Will Ferrell hater and I assure you, I am not. The documentary Will and Harper is among the best documentaries of 2024 and shows Ferrell as a wonderful person, eager to improve himself and carrying a wealth of compassion, curiosity and good humor. I'm also among the critics who enjoyed his attempts to marry comedy in drama in weird little movies like Stranger Than Fiction and Everything Must Go. Sadly, the failure of those movies clearly caused Will to give up on acting entirely in favor of simply being Will Ferrell, always turned up to 11, always leaving his co-stars confounded as they either failed to keep up or didn't even bother to try. You're Cordially Invited falls into the last category, no one else is even trying to keep up with Ferrell and the whole movie falls apart because it is centered around him.

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