Wedding Crashers (DVD, 2006, Widescreen Unrated)

"Wedding Crashers" is all runway and no takeoff. It assembles the elements for a laugh-out-loud comedy, but it can't make them fly. There are individual moments that are very funny. But it takes a merciless focus to make a good comedy, and the director, David Dobkin, has too much else on his mind. There are sequences involving Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson where you sense that the actors should have just broken into the cockpit and taken over the controls. There are few lonelier sights than a good comedian being funny in a movie that doesn't know what funny is.

The concept is terrific. The ads will fill the theaters on opening weekend, but people will trail out thinking, gee, I dunno ... why all the soppy sentiment and whose idea was the potty-mouthed grandmother? And don't they know that in a comedy the villain is supposed to be funny, and not a hateful, sadistic, egotistical monster who when he hits people really wants to hurt them, and who kicks them when they're down?

Vaughn and Wilson play Jeremy and John, old buddies who crash weddings. They have it all figured out how to pick up bridesmaids, available girls, unavailable girls, even the occasional straying wife. There's nothing like a wedding to get women feeling romantic. When they debate their seduction theories and go to work on their targets, they're very good, and we sit back expecting the movie to break loose, but the plot makes pointless detours.

Near the beginning, for example, there's a cute montage showing John and Jeremy at a lot of different weddings: Italian, Jewish, Irish, Indian. Different costumes, different food, different dances, great-looking babes. OK, and then there's another montage showing the same stuff, or maybe it's more of the same montage. We feel like we're drifting too far from shore. We need some plot to hang onto.

Jeremy and John's greatest challenge: Crashing the yacht club wedding of the daughter of Treasury Secretary Cleary (Christopher Walken). How can this go wrong? Walken can order pizza over the phone and we split a gut. But it goes wrong. Incredibly, the movie never fully exploits Walken's gift for weirdly inspired flights of logical lunacy. Meanwhile, Jeremy scores down on the beach with the youngest Cleary daughter, Gloria (Isla Fisher) and John falls more seriously in love with the most beautiful Cleary daughter, Claire (Rachel McAdams). Gloria wants her daddy to invite the boys back to the family's shore place, and starts stomping her little feet and throwing a tantrum to get her way -- but her tantrum, incredibly, is in long-shot, so we miss the interaction between Walken and his spoiled brat. The movie shows that the tantrum happens, as if it needs to explain why her daddy invites the boys to his house. It doesn't need to explain anything; it either has to make it funny, or not show it.

The Clearys are apparently studying to become Kennedys, and on their sprawling lawn Secretary Cleary suggests a game of touch football. That's when we become fully aware of Sack (Bradley Cooper), Claire's fiance, who tackles with brutality and stares with cold little eyes out of a hard face. He has the charisma of a knife.

There are a lot of ways to make touch football funny, and "Wedding Crashers" misses all of them. Why keep the Walken character so disengaged from the action, when it would be funnier for him to get tough than for the hateful Sack, who spreads a cloud of unease in every scene he occupies? I don't blame Cooper for this,