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Maybe Danny DeVito and Bette Midler should collaborate more often. The two times they did it was comedy gold. While this movie is not as flat out hilarious as "Ruthless People," it should still be enjoyed by the same people who love that movie. It starts with a prologue stating how Verplanck, New York was the location where they decided to launch the Yugo line of cars in America. As a result, everyone in town, including the police, drives a Yugo car, and they all have catchy license plates like UGOMONA, ELLEEE, and OH RONE.

As the title suggests, this black little whodunit concerns who opted to rid the small town of Verplanck of its nastiest inhabitant, the matriarchal hag Mona Dearly (Midler, who chews up every inch of the screen in her "Rashomon"-esque flashback scenes). Police Chief Wyatt Rash (Danny DeVito, playing against type as the straight man), is determined to find out, even if nobody else cares to help. It's come at a bad time, because he's trying to help his daughter Ellie (Neve Campbell) plan her big wedding to mild-mannered land-scaper Bobby Calzone (Casey Affleck), who has just ended up short-handed after his beer-guzzling partner Jeff Dearly (Marcus Thomas, the epitome of slackerdom) takes a leave of absence. Bobby also seems unnaturally concerned with the the death of a woman who meant only bad things for him.

The characters, while bordering on cartoons, are played tongue-in-cheek, and you know the actors had fun doing it. There's the chain-smoking waitress Rhona Mace (Jamie Lee Curtis), who's having an affair with the deceased's husband Phil (William Fichtner, who walks away with the movie as a complete scumbag), and Bobby's overbearing brother Murph (Mark Pellegrino). The cops are just as zany, with Peter Coyote as the do-gooder lieutenant, and Paul Ben-Victor and Paul Schulze (Ryan Chapelle from "24") as a couple of bumbling idiots who seem to be good for one thing, looking out for Numbers One. There's Katherine Wilhoite as Lucinda, the lesbian folk-singer mechanic, and the great Tracey Walter is on board as the local fisherman who nobody really knows much about. Add in a foul-mouthed, alcoholic priest, and a funeral director who's also an amateur pornographer (Will Ferrell before he became huge), and it's a feast for those with a twisted sense of humor.

Michael Mann is one of my favorite directors because he succeeds with virtually every project he undertakes. He has a keen sense of setting, character development, and how to stage action. He has been able to go from the urban cool of "Thief" to the epic frontier of "The Last of the Mohicans" and back with "Heat." With "The Insider," he showed how he could take a simple true-life story of a whistle-blower and imbue it with a sense of danger that is completely psychological.

His biopic "Ali" was ruined not by acting or direction so much as by the constraints of the outline, telling a by-the-numbers story that encompassed the legendary boxer's career, without breathing new life into the sub-genre. But Mann quickly rebounded from that misfire by reinventing his urban thriller with "Collateral," shot almost entirely in hi-def, with Tom Cruise giving one of his best performances, and comedian Jamie Foxx managing to outshine him at that.

Many credit Mann with creating "Miami Vice." It's not true, as he only executive produced the show and directed a few episodes. But it's still safe to say he knows the world the '80s hit takes place in. The movie, like the show, follows a squad of vice cops, particularly the maverick Sonny Crockett and the cool Ricardo Tubbs, here played by Colin Farrell and Mann favorite Foxx.

The movie picks up in the middle of a sting operation to bust a Haitian pimp at a disco. The sting is interrupted when they get an urgent call from an informant they haven't heard from in six months who's worried about his girlfriend, and some FBI sting operation fouling up. Due to some outside intel a white supremacist group is aware the people they are dealing with are FBI undercover operatives. And since Crockett and Tubbs know something's up, they agree to help FBI Agent Fujima (Ciaran Hinds) find out how his guys got leaked.

The film starts off at a break-neck pace, with so many strands it's hard to figure out what's going on. It actually feels like a TV show, because they have to squeeze so much into so little time, and we're not really sure how everything fits together.. As the film progresses, though, it becomes more focused, one big undercover sting, with Crockett getting in over his head with a Chinese/Cuban drug liaison. The supporting characters of Calabrese, Switek, and Zito, are underdeveloped. The casting of Barry Shabaka Hensley as Castillo was criticized early on by fans who wanted someone like Danny Trejo to fill the shoes left by Edward James Olmos. And while it is true that in Cuba and other countries south of Miami there are a fair amount of Negro Hispanics, Hensley doesn't fool anyone.

On the other hand, John Ortiz as bad guy Jose Yero chews up the screen nicely. Gong Li is stiff as Crockett's love interest, not to mention noticeably older (the actress is pushing forty, and Farrell is only thirty). British actress Naomie Harris does a great job of capturing the New Yawk accent of Trudy Joplin, and her chemistry with Foxx is good. Hinds, who recently garnered acclaim as Julius Caesar in the HBO series "Rome" and as the worrisome assassin in "Munich" plays a great bureaucrat, but it would've been nice to see more of him.

The hi-def photography works well for the most part, but less so in daytime, when some otherwise beautiful photography of South America is obscured by blurriness.

Mann has done a good job of reinventing the TV show for the modern era, but this is no "The Fugitive."

I'd heard this was a funny movie. I expected it to be funny. But I didn't expect it to be THIS funny! Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn headline a cast in what must be one of the absolute funniest movies I've seen in years. Part of the comic team that started out with "Zoolander" and later the VERY successful "Old School," among others, this is better than both. While movies like those, "Starsky & Hutch," etc. ended up relying quite heavily on the crude and outright disgusting, this movie forgoes much of that in favor of genuine laughs.

Vince Vaughn hearkens back to the over-the-top antics he first displayed in the cult hit "Swingers," while, perhaps for the first time, Wilson manages not to irritate me (okay, I'll admit Wes Anderson knows how to use him too). Together they generate enough laughs to sustain the picture by themselves. But luckily they are given a terrific supporting cast to help them on their way.

As mediators for couples in divorce settlements, they prove their effectiveness in the first scene, where they disturb separated spouses Dwight Yoakam and Rebecca De Mornay to the point that they want to settle just so these two don't have to talk anymore.

These guys do everything together, and they have for the last seventeen years. It is the most homo-erotic relationship between two heterosexual men to be shown in quite some time. The whole movie, they are after women, but it is their bond that holds things together. It has gotten so Jeremy (Vaughn) has promised, in keeping with tradition, never to let John (Wilson) spend his birthday alone, since the only child's parents are dead. And, as the title implies, every year they head to weddings looking for women to bed. They also make quite a scene at every wedding, assisting with the cutting of the cake, and making speeches to the bride and groom.

But then comes the "Kentucky Durby of weddings," Treasury Secretary Cleary (Christopher Walken) is walking his oldest daughter down the aisle. The scene features walk-ons by Sen. John McCain and James Carville. The two buddies go in as "brothers from New Hampshire," and things spiral out of control. John sets his sights for Claire Cleary, (Rachel McAdams), the middle child who is dating a selfish environmental lobbyist (Bradley Cooper, of "Alias" fame). Jeremy, who just wants to stick to the plan of the one-night stand, becomes the object of obsessive deflowered virgin Gloria Cleary (Ilsa Fisher, giving perhaps the most energetic performance of the film), not to mention the secretary's gay son, Todd. Mrs. Cleary (Jane Seymour) attempts to seduce John in a rather humiliating scene reminiscent of "The Graduate." Another hilarious addition is the secretary's foul-mouthed mother, who describes First-Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as being a dyke. Henry Gibson, as the meek Father is also a pleasure, not so much for what he says (since he has very few lines) but what he doesn't say, including listening to Vaughn give confession, ending with a mouth-to-mouth kiss to seal the deal.

Vaughn and Fisher are a perfect romantic pair, because each one is just as crazy as the other, and as determined as she is to screw him, he's just as determined to keep away. Owen Wilson, more subdued than his co-star, actually shows a depth heretofore unseen in his character. Will Ferrell has an uncredited cameo as the entrepreneur who taught Vaughn how to crash weddings, a momma's boy who now gets his kicks crashing funerals.

The references to bodily organs, sex, etc. are all fairly relevant in the context of the story, and not overdone. It's crude, but unlike "Old School," stuff isn't just thrown in there because the writers couldn't think of anything genuinely funny to say.