“The Wedding Ringer” is not so much a rom-com as an anatomy lesson. And the lesson is this: Men have balls. They must have them, or grow them, otherwise they are not men. They are little girls. And little girls are stupid. They grow up into women, who subsist primarily on disingenuous compliments from men and fantasies about the perfect wedding day.

Chief ball-haver in this pandering flick, from first-time feature director Jeremy Garelick, is Jimmy Callahan (Kevin Hart), a smooth talker who’s managed to parlay his skill at giving a toast into a business: Best Man Inc. For a steep fee, he’ll pretend he’s your long-lost best friend, and deliver a wedding reception speech that’ll have your bride and all her gullible friends and family members shedding tears of joy.

His new client is Doug (Josh Gad), a sweaty beta male who’s just realizing, after proposing to his shallow but hot girlfriend (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting), that he doesn’t have a single friend he can ask to be a groomsman. So he’ll pay Jimmy big bucks for his premiere package, the Golden Tux.

Cue the assembly of Jimmy’s low-life buddies to play the part of Doug’s group of friends; they’re a motley bunch who reminded me a bit of the comedy “Old School,” except with lots of gags about prison rape and stuttering (the one guy with model-good looks has a speech impediment, which is played for laughs ad nauseam).

Matt Kennedy © 2014 Screen Gems, Inc.
Meanwhile, Jimmy — his best-man persona named “Bic Mitchum,” after random objects in Doug’s medicine cabinet — meets the bride’s family, whose patriarch (Ken Howard) is introduced delivering this bon mot: “Does anyone else feel really f - - king gay right now?” His skin is crawling, you see, because of the proximity of the bride’s flamboyant wedding planner (Ignacio Serricchio), who is clearly a fan of balls, but not in the right way.

The get-to-know-you brunch with the bride’s family ends with Grandma (poor Cloris Leachman) getting set on fire. And later, Doug gets an intimate tongue bath from a basset hound at his bachelor party.

Gad and Hart have one brief moment of transcending this film, when they take to the dance floor on a practice run for the wedding. Doug may not have balls, but he does have dance moves — and in a weird counterweight to the many gay slurs in this movie, this couple lights up the screen as they tango.

Hart is such a skilled comic — his lightning-fast riffs are almost always funny, even when they’re in the midst of hateful dreck like this — that I can’t believe he can’t talk his way into better material. Forget weddings. This guy needs an Agent Ringer.