Urgh…
The day I had been dreading for months finally arrived. I had to sit down and screen Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. For five straight months, every single movie I watched came with a trailer for this film, and after seeing that trailer enough times I honestly didn’t see much to look forward to. At first glance it looked like another tired attempt at what Hollywood currently calls “comedy”: forced adult humor, edgy sex jokes, and wall-to-wall profanity that somehow manages to miss the mark of actually being funny in all three categories. My early prediction was that this would land among the worse comedies of the year. Perhaps I was a little too harsh… but only a little. We begin with brothers Mike and Dave Stangle, played by Adam DeVine and Zac Efron.
These two spend most of their lives conning businesses into stocking their brand of tequila and nearly causing multiple counts of manslaughter at every family gathering they attend. After their parents finally put their foot down and demand they bring respectable dates to their little sister’s wedding in Hawaii, the boys post a Craigslist ad looking for two women to accompany them. As anyone who has ever posted an ad promising a free week in Hawaii could have predicted, they get hundreds of responses almost overnight. When Alice and Tatiana (Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza) catch the brothers being interviewed on The Wendy Williams Show (because of course unemployed people are watching Wendy Williams at 1 in the afternoon), the girls decide to con their way into the trip and prepare themselves for a week of pure decadence and debauchery.
I have to give credit where credit is due: the chemistry between Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza is the single best thing about this movie. Every time the two women are on screen together, there are legitimate laughs and actual entertainment. Plaza’s deadpan ability to set up a bit and Kendrick’s perfect timing playing off her give the film the boost it desperately needs. I truly believe that if the entire movie had focused more on their characters, we would have ended up with something significantly better. Because while the women succeed at being funny, their male counterparts flop… hard. Adam DeVine’s performance is the cinematic equivalent of wanting to change the channel. His comedic delivery falls flat at nearly every turn.
Multiple times he takes a joke that wasn’t very funny to begin with and stretches it into a full minute-long bit that brings the entire movie to a screeching halt. Zac Efron mostly plays it straight, spending large portions of the runtime simply reacting to his brother’s stupidity and looking vaguely surprised whenever things don’t go his way. Dave is easily the most likable of the two brothers, but only because he seems to be the only major character who isn’t required to be on medication.Ultimately what works against the film is that every character feels like a cartoon instead of a real person. Not only are they barely believable, they all seem to have been written from a checklist of tired stereotypes: the generic uppity parents, the snowflake daughter, the overly aggressive lesbian cousin, the OCD wedding planner, Black Guy #1, Black Guy #2, and a rotating cast of supporting players whose only jobs are to deliver drug jokes and dick jokes on cue.
I didn’t hate Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates the way I fully expected to. Are there some good laughs here? Yes. There are genuine moments of clever ad-libbing between characters, and the story never completely flies off the rails into pure chaos. Plaza and Kendrick are excellent, and Efron is at least serviceable. I genuinely feel that if Adam DeVine had been omitted from the cast entirely, I would have rated this movie much higher. Unfortunately, with DeVine comes an endless parade of unfunny, profanity-laced tirades and cringeworthy attempts to force a laugh where none exists.
At 98 minutes the movie is short enough that it doesn’t completely overstay its welcome, but it still feels padded in places thanks to those extended DeVine bits. The Hawaii setting is pretty, the supporting cast (including a fun cameo from Wendy Williams herself) does what it can, and the central “two pairs of liars trying to out-con each other” premise has potential. The problem is that the script keeps defaulting to the loudest, broadest, least clever version of every joke available.Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is a perfectly fine movie to throw on Netflix and half-watch while you do something else. That’s about the highest praise I can give it.
With a little more “addition by subtraction” — specifically subtracting one very loud, very unfunny brother — this could have been one of the more enjoyable mainstream comedies of the year. Instead it settles for being aggressively okay.
2/5
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