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The mixture of slapstick and sincerity doesn’t always work, but a game cast does their best. Ferrell is indulging familiar schtick here, switching from wide-eyed earnestness to borderline violent intensity with ease, while Witherspoon mostly plays the material straight.

Any film combining the comedy talents of Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon is unlikely to be entirely terrible. That said, the wildly uneven wedding clash comedy You’re Cordially Invited is certainly in the vicinity of terrible on numerous occasions... Ferrell’s crocodile wrestling scene notwithstanding, this just feels like a Bride Wars rip-off without the bite.

Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon have both been around long enough to have become the movie star equivalent of comfort food. By this point in their respective careers, you know what you’re getting, especially if the project is a comedy, and if you like it, it’ll fill you up for a couple of hours. “You’re Cordially Invited” is reheated comedy leftovers, for the most part, but there’s enough warmth, sentimentality, and belly laughs to make for a raucous timewaster.

Hats off to the writer-director Nicholas Stoller, who has taken an exhausted genre (the wedding comedy) and a flatlining premise (warring bridal parties) and somehow brought the whole thing to vivid, frequently side-splitting, life. Stoller, of course, has form here, having previously made the winningly eccentric The Five Year Engagement.

Ferrell and Witherspoon perform it all convincingly, their quieter moments of reflection proving the highlights here. The trouble is, the comedy topping feels a bit underpowered – despite a talented cast, there simply aren’t enough laughs to fill nearly two hours.

For Witherspoon, You’re Cordially Invited is neither silly enough to let her stretch the comedy muscles that she doesn’t get to flex often enough, nor able to stay focused enough to let the legitimately touching and emotional moments of the film hit home. Meanwhile, Ferrell faces something close to the opposite problem by having to push subtle jokes over the line of common sense into ridiculousness, when You’re Cordially Invited is far more effective playing it straight.

Like so many weddings, it’s a little too busy with an abundance of characters and subplots to keep track of (although Celia Weston as Witherspoon’s awful southern mother is an obvious winner) and there’s a final left-of-field plot development that feels like it was suggested by a particularly stupid test audience. But there’s an unseasonably good time to be had here, invitation worth accepting.

Destined to be forgotten in the wasteland that stretches between the actor’s best work and his worst, this dumb-but-not-dumb-enough, simultaneously heartwarming and disheartening film features layer upon layer of wedding-disaster clichés (complete with a trashed cake). What’s worse, it’s all wrapped inside a forced romantic comedy, like an ill-fitting tuxedo.

Perhaps most disappointingly, while Witherspoon has her tightly wound but good-hearted big sister thing down perfectly, it doesn’t seem as if Ferrell’s full comedic genius makes it onto the screen. It’s not the fault of his character; the sweet but somewhat bizarre guy fits him well. But there are moments when you can see his impish flair for improvisation shine through, and these moments highlight how little time he gets to let loose — or, at least, how little of it made it into the final cut.

The idea of bringing together these two titans of Hollywood likability—veterans, in Ferrell’s case literally, of the old-school studio comedy—had promise. Emphasis on the “had.”

It’s the kind of movie you can have running in the background, without paying it too much mind. We’re getting more and more of those these days. They’re not diversions—they don’t demand enough from us for that. Instead, they have a narcotic quality: they don’t seek to sharpen our senses but to dull them. That’s the opposite of what we need in an age of chaos.

There is really nothing that is not completely predictable about Amazon Prime Video‘s latest big budget romantic comedy, but with Reese Witherspoon back in the genre, and Will Ferrell doing what he does best, the chemistry is there, and so are some laughs, including a real LOL moment involving Ferrell and an uncooperative alligator that is a good reason comedies should probably best be seen with a crowd. Unfortunately, despite its stars and fan-friendly genre, this one is straight to streaming.