The Big Wedding: This is a party you won't want an invitation to

By Christopher Tookey

Published: 15:43 EST, 23 May 2013 | Updated: 15:43 EST, 23 May 2013


The Big Wedding (15)

Verdict: Tear up the invitation

Star rating: Turkey

Almost as dreary as The Hangover Part III, is The Big Wedding (which is released next Wednesday) and it’s an even bigger waste of talent.

Writer-director Justin Zackham’s first produced screenplay was The Bucket List, which comprehensively squandered the talents of Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.

His second involves four Academy Award winners, all cruelly wasted on roles unworthy of them.

Waste: Talented actors Susan Sarandon, Robin Williams, and Robert De Niro in turkey The Big Wedding

Robert De Niro effs and blinds his way through the picture as a wealthy sculptor throwing a wedding for his adopted son Alejandro (Ben Barnes) and his inamorata (Amanda Seyfried), presided over by  a leering Catholic priest — Robin Williams.

Alejandro has neglected to tell his austerely reactionary Colombian birth mother (Patricia Rae) that his adoptive father and mother (Diane Keaton) have divorced, and Dad is now shacked up with his ex-wife’s best friend (Susan Sarandon).

So Dad and his ex-wife pretend they are still married. It is unclear as to why they think this is going to fool the rest of the guests, who presumably know their real situation. Oddly enough, no one brings this up.

Blissfully unaware of its own racism, misogyny and homophobia, the film preaches bland tolerance of sexual peccadilloes and uses a lot of smutty language that feels wildly inappropriate coming out of the mouths of the elderly.

This is yet another of those films that panders to the worst elements of youth by making the old seem, at best, half-witted. At one point, Diane Keaton — the former star of Annie Hall, Manhattan and

The Godfather — delivers the line: ‘It’s humiliating’. Too right it is.

As if all this isn’t painful enough, the beautiful but dependably atrocious Katherine Heigl turns up as De Niro’s daughter and vomits all over him. It’s a fitting metaphor for the state of modern Hollywood comedy.