The Wedding Ringer

A friendless groom-to-be (Josh Gad) desperately turns to a professional best man (Kevin Hart), who runs a lucrative business catering to such losers. The script by Jay Lavender and director Jeremy Garelick has a clever title and an amusing premise, and the movie benefits from the teaming of Hart and Gad (they're like a millennial version of Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder). But the picture suffers from Garelick's inept direction; he shows no sense of pacing and is so desperate for laughs that he throws crude sight gags at us like blasts from a pump-action shotgun, obscuring long stretches of dialogue. Gad and Hart manage several effective moments (maybe Garelick left the camera running while he went out for coffee); here's hoping they work together again, preferably for someone who knows what he's doing.