Review: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
Loosely based on an improbably true story of two brothers who trolled for dates on Craigslist and became viral sensations, the basic premise of Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is right there in the title. Mike and Dave (Adam Devine and Zac Efron) need wedding dates and the dates they choose end up being far more than the brothers bargained for.
Exasperated by the naughty man-boys history of ruining family gatherings with their stoned, sozzled and just plain stupid shenanigans, their father (Stephen Root, underused but still managing to do 101 excellent variations of a man on the brink of strangling his own sons) mandates that they bring dates to their younger sister Jeanie's (Sugar Lyn Beard, a standout) wedding in Hawaii. And not just any dates - nice, smart girls who'll hopefully keep them in line. Mike and Dave may be unflappable party boys who amp each other up, but they love their sister and agree to find respectable dates.
Their Craiglist ad promising an all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii goes viral, even landing them a spot on The Wendy Williams Show, and netting 6,000 applicants, most of whom range from idiotic party girls to one cross-dresser. The main punchline of the film is not only do their eventual dates find them, but they turn out to be more wild, vulgar and outrageous than Mike and Dave. Wearing more makeup than clothes and as constantly intoxicated as they are broke, Tatiana and Alice (Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick) aren't exactly the kind of girls you'd bring home to mother. The shrewd Tatiana sees Mike and Dave's ad as an opportunity to score a free vacay and a chance for Alice, still traumatised from being dumped at the altar, to get her groove back.
The girls make a great impression on Mom, Dad and baby sis, but trouble is constantly round the corner especially since sex is off the table (the girls won't put out before the wedding). Screenwriters Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O'Brien, who penned both Bad Neighbours films, fare best when the laughs are situational - an ATV trip about to go horribly awry, a very special and tremendously hilarious massage, and a tripping on Ecstasy scene in which Dave sees more of his sister than he ever wanted to and Alice remarks, "I can't continue to wear this horse." Otherwise, there's an over-reliance on raunch to act as the comedy and perhaps too much of a dependence on the actors to either ad-lib or sell the scripted lines. This results in numerous moments of flatness and instances where the laugh comes a beat or two after the joke has already worn itself so thin as to be non-existent. Still, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is a continuation on the girls-can-behave-as-badly-as-boys theme they did so well in Bad Neighbours 2: Sorority Rising and which has become almost a genre unto itself in modern comedy.
The cast are uniformly strong though Kendrick is a weak link. She's very game and often good as the daffy Alice, but one can sense an underlying strain in her playing. It probably doesn't help that she's paired up with Plaza, truly one of the more unique presences working today. With her withering gaze and slicing delivery, she cuts everyone down to size including DeVine, whose hyperactive throbbing id of a performance positions him to be this generation's Jerry Lewis (in case it's not clear, that's a compliment). Her impersonation of a good girl is, to quote Sweet Smell of Success, like a cookie made of arsenic.
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
Directed by: Jake Szymanski
Written by: Andrew Jay Cohen, Brendan O'Brien
Starring: Zac Efron, Adam Devine, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Stephen Root, Sugar Lyn Beard, Stephanie Faracy, Sam Richardson, Jake Johnson, Kumail Nanjiani
