You’re Cordially Invited (2025) is directed by Nicholas Stoller and stars Will Ferrell, Reese Witherspoon, Geraldine Viswanathan, Meredith Hagner, Jimmy Tatro, Stony Blyden, Leanne Morgan, Rory Scovel, Keyla Monterroso Mejia, Ramona Young, Jack McBrayer, Fortune Feimster, and Celia Weston. After a venue accidentally books two weddings on the same weekend, one bride’s father, Jim (Ferrell), and the other bride’s sister, Margot (Witherspoon), engage in a battle of wills to make sure their ceremonies don’t interfere with one another. Throughout the weekend, hijinks and various attempts at sabotage force Jim and Margot to reconsider their actions and find common ground so they can work together to salvage their loved one’s weddings. 

When the film focuses on comedy, Ferrell and Witherspoon are perfectly serviceable leads who deliver the script’s so-so jokes with dead-on timing. Unfortunately, the film spends a lot of time (especially in the third act) exploring the more emotional/serious implications of its premise. The thing is, these moments have little interesting to say and just boil down to characters giving emotional apologies that don’t even slightly justify their length. Witherspoon shifts between these tones with ease, but Will Farrell fails to convince as a dramatic performer. It’s a shame because a more joke-centric third act would have gone a long way in terms of making up for the mediocre setup. Instead, we get emotional payoffs to relationships we don’t care about because the characters never do anything that’s particularly funny (and by extension, likable). The fact that the writers thought we’d care about these characters by the end is honestly one of the funnier jokes the experience has to offer. Every character younger than 30 years old is written to be a complete idiot while everyone older is a complete weirdo. What’s the point of writing everyone like this if you don’t intend to take advantage of it comedically?

The script never feels like it takes full advantage of its inherently comedic premise. The jokes receive little buildup and as a result, feel like lazy one-liners that a mid-level script doctor was hired to inject last minute. It’s almost as if this was never intended to be a straight-up comedy, but the studio forced the writers to take a more marketable direction at the last minute. Occasionally, the script even falls into the all-too-common and shamelessly desperate comedy-writing trap of forcing its characters to curse pervasively for the sake of a cheap shock laugh. 

Besides one slightly memorable sequence involving a dock mishap that sends a large group of people into a lake, there’s a concerning lack of interesting sequences/set pieces. I’d be able to forgive the movie’s slow pace if it eventually built to something interesting, but that just never happens. Even the ending is extremely predictable to the point that although it works, it only confirms the script’s absurd lack of creativity. 

Overall, this is destined to be one of the more easily forgotten movies of 2025 and is more or less a total snoozefest. That being said, it’s never a particularly offensive experience. If you like these actors and are in the mood for a film that provides some strong destination wedding vibes, there’s a good chance you’ll find this to be an easy way to kill two hours. Just don’t expect a return to form from Will Farrell (or even to laugh much for that matter). If you’re on the fence at all about watching, I can confidently say to skip this one. C