It's no secret that Jake Szymanski has seen The Wedding Crashers. Not only does Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates similarly feature grown men with the emotional development of 10-year-olds, those characters continually reference the previous film. That could be a problem when viewers realize they could have streamed, borrowed or bootlegged The Wedding Crashers instead of buying tickets to Mike and Dave.
Despite featuring a solid cast and a script by Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O'Brien, the duo who wrote most of Neighbors, this fictionalized reworking of the famous internet story of how siblings Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave Stangle (Zac Efron) place an ad on Craigslist to recruit some dates for their sister Jeanie's (Sugar Lyn Beard) wedding is a weak entry in the sub-Judd Apatow dirty, sweet derby.
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
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Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, Zac Efron, Adam Devine, Sugar Lyn Beard, Stephen Root, Alice Wetterlund, Sam Richardson
Director: Jake Szymanski
Rating: R, for crude sexual content, language throughout, drug use and some graphic nudity
Running time: 98 minutes
Their frustrated parents (Stephen Root and Stephanie Faracy) have mandated that Mike and Dave find dates because they have a habit of getting drunk and ruining family gatherings. The prospect of pretty bridesmaids makes them likely to embarrass the entire Stangle clan or cause property damage.
Several young women volunteer to take Mike and Dave up on their offer. Jeanie and Eric (Sam Richardson) are holding the event in Hawaii, and the brothers have agreed to foot the travel and hotel bill for their dates. Even if they aren't ideal matches, a free trip to Honolulu is hard to pass up.
It certainly is for recently unemployed waitresses Alice (Anna Kendrick) and Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza). The two impress Mike and Dave when Tatiana pretends to be injured in a car accident and both impersonate, with varying success, white collar professionals. The women also have the ability to drink Mike and Dave under the table.
Cohen and O'Brien realize that the movie would fall apart quickly if all the brothers and their dates did was get inebriated. It's no fun if you can't share in the buzz. Dave is a sensitive man who tires of calming down his short-tempered sibling. Efron has a ball practicing lots of cheesy accents and impersonations. In addition, Alice's chemical adventures are partly her way of dealing with the fact that her groom literally dumped her at the altar.
It helps a little that Kendrick and Plaza are off-screen friends; their rapport seems genuine.
If Cohen and O'Brien have replicated the emotional core of Neighbors, they can't come up with enough comic debauchery to fill the movie's running time. Hearing Plaza repeat the same joke five times makes one wonder if Szymanski has some type of Finding Dory memory loss that puts him behind the audience.
As the outtakes during the closing credits indicate, much of the banter was ad-libbed and indifferently selected. The funnier lines are supposed to be used in the movie, not in the closing titles. (The sound mix also seems a bit off. At times, the actors' lip movements indicate they've seen Godzilla or Mothra tear up a building instead of the situation at hand.)
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates proves that raunchy, booze-soaked comedies work only when the audience has more fun than the people on screen.
MovieStyle on 07/08/2016