Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates [Review by Haus]

Well, here’s the Pitch Perfect-meets-Dirty Grandpa mashup that precisely no one asked for. And it’s dumb. And sometimes hilarious.

There’s a definite Apatow-type genre comedy making the rounds these days, consisting of semi-improvised dirty talk by young ne’er do wells who suddenly get super wholesome around act three. This is one of those, and it’s a decent example of the breed — which is to say, not particularly intelligent and almost entirely dependent on (a) its cast and (b) the ability of said cast to pull off funny one liners.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates isn’t a good movie, but it does get you from (a) to (b). (Like that?)

The titular Stangle brothers (Dave, played by Zac Efron, and Mike, Adam Devine) are thinly-sketched liquor salesmen with a serious failure to launch; while they bounce around all Animal House style, their parents lament the brothers’ (utterly contrived) history of ruining family gatherings (by generally being manic and partying too hard). The parents implore the duo to stop chasing women and to find real, actual dates for their dear little sister’s wedding.

Their Craigslist ad soon goes viral, landing them a TV spot and the attention of an even bigger pair of screw ups, freshly unemployed drunks Tatiana and Alice, played by Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick. The wily ladies hatch a scheme to clean themselves up, land the guys, and score a free trip to Hawai’i. Of course, they do.

The wedding gets royally boned, but that’s not particularly funny or interesting. People also get sporadically wholesome, and ditto on that. These characters are thin and none has much of an arc save for bouncing around like pinballs between wholly artificial deep reveals. If it weren’t for Plaza’s foul-mouthed quips over sly, knowing glances, Kendrick’s actually-kind-of-decent-after-all damaged damsel, Devine’s babyface rants, and Efron’s pure comedic charisma, this film would founder. But every now and then, the guys — and it is generally the guys, I think — hit one out of the park. There’s some legitimately funny stuff in here. (It also has low points, like the cringe-worthy, 2010-era Adam Sandler-style cutting of the ATV crash scene. Feels like you’re watching a cheap B-movie comedy.) Upshot, it’s uneven.

The supporting cast is decent here. I doubt you’ll rush to the marquee to see Stephen Root, but he’s good as the frustrated dad; Sugar Lyn Beard (now there’s a name) does more with the little sister bridal role than she probably needs to, hamming it up to good effect. I enjoyed the choice of Sam Richardson as her fiance, and similarly that the filmmakers made precisely no mention of the fact that the pending marriage was interracial. (But before you ring the bell and declare social justice achieved, consider the underlying premise of women as simple arm candy to soothe and control hyperactive man-boys — and gaze also upon Alice Wetterlund‘s “Cousin Terry,” a comic-relief predatory lesbian with a Tesla who certainly comes off like a stereotype, but to my knowledge, isn’t — at least not yet.) Bell not rung.

I will say, for a movie about pretending to be someone you’re not, this film graciously shortchanges the inevitable reveal. (You know, that moment when a protagonist has fibbed to get where they are, reaped the rewards, and then has to come clean, despite having developed real feelings in the interim… their poor counterpart is always dumbstruck and super hurt, whereas in real life they’d likely have smelled a rat and seen it all coming.) Reveals happen here, of course, but they don’t seem to matter very much to anyone. Blink and you’ll miss one of them. I like that.

So, overall? I loved the first 15 minutes of this movie. I loved various other minutes of it, but nowhere near all of them. It has a saggy and dumb middle and it misses its shot at greatness by a substantial margin. But sometimes you’re in the market for a lousy, R-rated comedy with a few high notes, some good looking leads, improvised quips, and nice Hawaiian scenery.  There are other, better entries in this slim little canon (Forgetting Sarah Marshall comes immediately to mind), but this one isn’t all bad. Summer’s here. See a movie.

Haus Verdict: About as smart as you thought it would be (not very), and sometimes a whole lot funnier. Efron really makes it for me. Is that weird? 

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates opens Friday, July 8.

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