Reese Witherspoon in Amazon Dud

You can often find a direct ratio between a screen comedy’s level of desperation and the frequency of four-letter words in its dialogue. Judging by the seemingly endless number of “f**ks” and “b***hes” dropped by its characters, You’re Cordially Invited is desperate indeed. When one of a film’s more notable lines is “We are going to chaos-monkey the motherfucking shit out of him,” you pretty much know that comic inspiration was in short supply.

Writer-director Nicholas Stoller has made some decent films in the past, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Bros. And his Apple TV+ series Platonic, starring Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen, was genuinely witty and touching. But this latest effort, premiering on Prime Video, proves a relentlessly vulgar and witless affair that not even the talents of stars Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon and a comedically gifted supporting cast can rescue. By the time you see Ferrell wrestling a very fake-looking alligator in a hotel room, it’s painfully obvious that the film has jumped the shark. Or in this case, the alligator.

The storyline involves two weddings that have been accidentally booked for the same weekend at the same inn on a small island in Georgia. And by “accidentally,” I mean that one reservation fails to be recorded because the elderly front desk clerk suddenly drops dead of a heart attack just as she’s about to write it down. It’s about as funny as it sounds.

The problem is that the weddings are being arranged by Margot (Witherspoon), a reality television show producer (cue the obvious jokes), for her younger sister Neve (Meredith Hagner, Search Party) — the only family member to whom she’s close — and the widowed Jim (Ferrell) for his daughter Jenni (the terrific Geraldine Viswanathan, Drive-Away Dolls), with whom he has an unhealthily, clingy relationship. Both Margot and Jim are manically determined to make their respective events magical, so they’re extremely upset when their wedding parties arrive on the island at the same time to discover that one of them has to leave.

Hearing of Jim’s widower status, the sympathetic Margot generously offers to share the facilities via an elaborately coordinated schedule. It seems like a perfectly fine compromise until things inevitably go wrong and Jim and Margot become determined to sabotage each other’s wedding plans. Cue the War of the Roses-style violent mayhem, with hilarity failing to ensue. Unless you consider a boat smashing into a wooden dock and dunking all the beautifully dressed wedding guests into a lake to be hilarious.

This is one of those comedies that attempts to have it both ways by going as broad as possible while also yanking at the heartstrings. Thus, a scene in which a man dressed as a dancing zebra (don’t ask) destroys a lavish wedding cake that Jim lovingly baked himself is followed by a tender interlude in which he talks to his dead wife and tells her how much he misses her.

Stoller strains mightily here for the sort of cringe comedy in which he’s long trafficked, exemplified by a scene in which Jim and his daughter sing a duet of “Islands in the Stream,” featuring such lyrics as “Making love with each other, ah ha,” that borders on incestuous. There’s a useless cameo by football great Peyton Manning, and another one by Nick Jonas as a “f—able pastor,” in the words of one of the wedding guests.

Ferrell works hard, very hard, to put the material over, and to his credit, he occasionally succeeds by dint of his boundless comic energy. And Witherspoon, returning to the sort of broad comedy with which she triumphed in such films as Legally Blonde, matches him effectively with her sharp timing and appealing screen persona.

Some of the supporting players, such as comedian Leanne Morgan and Jack McBrayer, garner laughs with their funny turns as a sex-crazed wedding guest and harried inn manager, respectively. And Celia Weston single-handedly elevates the proceedings with her emotionally grounded turn as a Southern matriarch. But the performers’ strenuous efforts are not enough to compensate for the sheer stupidity of much of the proceedings.

At one point in the chaotic goings-on, Ferrell’s character fakes having a heart attack. The moment is a good indicator of how low both he and the movie have sunk.