Wedding Crashers ** out of ****

Amidst the raunchy humor, a current of anger and brutality.

"Wedding Crashers" is snug fit for a new subcategory in the comedy genre: Rage humor. Ostensibly about two crude dudes who cruise wedding receptions looking for easy girls and cheap laughs, the movie is really a manifesto on the guilty lusts and yearnings of the middle-class man. There is a cruelty and cynicism running under the action of this and "Old School," most Adam Sandler flicks, and the "American Pie" trilogy.

And while some films - "About A Boy," "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Punch-Drunk Love" - actually examine the paradigms that create puerile adults, "Wedding Crashers," far more sentimental than its premise would suggest, assumes the emotional infancy of its two main characters and couches their awakening in a fantasy worthy of a John Hughes production. It is not so much funny as it is manipulative.

John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) are divorce mediators - at least in the opening scene - who spend their Washington D.C. summers scouting the fanciest nuptials, blending into the party, and picking off tipsy romantics. They have a rulebook, occasionally quoted, with equality - both guys must score, or neither does - as its highest virtue. "Wedding Crashers" is funniest in its opening scenes, before the boys meet the family of U.S. Treasury Secretary Cleary (Christopher Walken) and his daughters Gloria (Isla Fisher) and Claire (Rachel McAdams).

The movie spends its next hour at the Cleary summer house, as the smitten John tries to coax Claire away from boyfriend Sack (Bradley Cooper) while Jeremy has conflicting desires about the predatory, clingy Gloria. The rest of the Cleary clan are one-note jokes expressed as performances - including a purposely bizarre son, potty-mouthed grandma, and boozy matriarch (Jane Seymour) - but the linchpin to the movie's tone is amoral, abusive Sack. Dressed like a Soc from "The Outsiders" and played by Cooper with deranged glee, Sack is a black-hatted villain of violent duplicity - convicted murderer Scott Peterson on steroids.

Reminiscent of Craig Kilborn's repugnant turn in "Old School," Sack's existence suggests a social commentary on the part of writers Steve Faber and Bob Fisher and director David Dobkin meant to dismiss John and Jeremy's reckless behavior - they're sleazebags with a heart of gold, ya know - via this display of ugly masculinity, while tacking up a thesis against those impossibly gorgeous, witty rich girls who cave to societal pressure to marry goons of the upper crust.

The examination of such fragile creatures has been a preeminent American theme since "The Great Gatsby;" the gulf between Fitzgerald's aim of demystifying a social class, and "Wedding Crashers," which means to forgive undisciplined lust in light of Sack's brutality is massive. Ditto the goal of "Old School" to forgive alcoholism and immaturity if it means becoming a fatuous, slick pig. None of the subtext makes it any funnier.

Vaughn is relegated to sidekick in the narrative, but the movie's humor belongs almost solely to his verbal riffs, which benefit from Vaughn's size and image of a raconteur gone to seed and red-rimmed world weariness. There is a Oscar performance inside Vaughn should the right dramatic role present itself; like Ray Liotta, he was born with equal parts manic showman and twisted intellectual. But Wilson tends to avoid his niche like the plague and play whatever pays the bills, thus he is again a cool-guy leading man without any lines, looks or natural charm to recommend him. He generates nothing with McAdams, whose bright smirk creates enough chemistry for both of them. As for the rest of the principals: Fisher gets her 15 minutes. Cooper pages Eric Roberts in the psych ward. Walken is stiff and sincere. Translated: He was paid to show up to be in the trailer.

And Will Ferrell, in what needs to be the last cameo of his career, is asked to rescue the last half of the movie in a short stint as an aging wedding crasher named Chazz. A dead-armed aging quarterback, Farrell presses embarrassingly - he resorts to yelling as comedy - and gesticulates mindlessly. Kneading a myth with middlebrow gutter humor as it does, "Wedding Crashers" was a remarkable success in the moment, but like Sandler's many lesser works, it is destined to become a fallback favorite of young Americans who laugh so as not to sit stunned by the silence of their smudgy morality as they root on brown shirt lounge lizards.