You're Cordially Invited: Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell star in 'gag-per-minute' rom-com

"Hats off to the writer-director Nicholas Stoller", who has taken an exhausted genre (the wedding comedy) and somehow brought it to "vivid, frequently side-splitting life", said Kevin Maher in The Times.

In "You're Cordially Invited", Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell play the antagonists of a "weekend wedding nightmare" that occurs when two ceremonies are accidentally booked for the same date, on the same alligator-infested island in Georgia. Ferrell plays the overprotective dad of the first bride (Geraldine Viswanathan), Witherspoon is a high-flying TV producer whose sister (Meredith Hagner) is the other one. The script is strong for a "wacky comedy" of this sort, with an often staggering "gag-per-minute ratio", and Witherspoon, who also serves as a producer, "brings A-list smarts and a genuine performance. Like everything here, it's a cut above."

"There's a surprising amount of low-rent fun to be had" with this "simple and silly" Amazon crowdpleaser, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. Yes, there are misses – "some overly absurdist physical comedy, a final song and dance" – but they're "just about outdone by the hits", and it's a pleasure to watch Witherspoon and Ferrell do their thing.

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Stoller has some solid comedies to his name ("Forgetting Sarah Marshall", "Yes Man"), said Stephanie Zacharek in Time, and it seems he wants to present more of the same here: "zaniness served up with a slight edge". The trouble is, this film isn't at all zany or edgy. The kind of slop "you can have running in the background, without paying it too much mind", it is a gentle narcotic to dull the senses, rather than sharpen them.