Image: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates photograph courtesy Fox.
It takes a particular combination of factors to craft a film that’s both careful and freewheeling. In the case of Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, loosely basing its narrative on the real-life story of two brothers who took to the internet to find nice girls to take to their sister’s Hawaiian-set ceremony proves a factor in both — and a provides a situation so outlandish it has to be true, yet still seems perfect for a comedic movie script. Add a raft of re-teamings of both the talent and writer (Zac Efron with his Dirty Grandpa co-star Aubrey Plaza and Bad Neighbours 1 and 2 scribes Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien, plus Pitch Perfect‘s Anna Kendrick and Adam Devine), as well as a first-time feature director with a background in live television comedy (Saturday Night Live‘s Jake Szymanski), and the film’s formulaic yet laidback air starts to solidify.
Indeed, the movie that eventuates is less like a case of colouring within the clear lines sketched out by other matrimony-centric attempts at cinematic hilarity such as evident precursor Wedding Crashers, and more akin to grabbing a handful of previously successful elements, throwing them into a popular template, and seeing were the pieces start to fit together — and, in some cases, where they leave gaps or push against each other. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is as predictably raucous, set-piece-oriented and one-liner-driven as it sounds, while intermittently offering something more palatable. It’s a film audiences will feel like they’ve seen before, but enlivened — in places, at least — by its helmer’s trust in his cast.
“We never get riled up,” the titular Mike (Devine) and Dave (Efron) Stangle yell at increasing volumes at their parents (Finding Dory‘s Stephen Root and The Five-Year Engagement‘s Stephanie Faracy) and younger sister Jeanie (Sugar Lyn Beard, Aloha) at an intervention-like gathering, immediately demonstrating just why their loved ones have sat them down for a serious talk. Known for their loutish antics at special occasions, they’re given a strict edict about their attendance at Jeanie’s forthcoming nuptials to Eric (Sam Richardson, TV’s Veep): they must find respectable companions to accompany them. Enter the hard-partying Tatiana (Plaza) and Alice (Kendrick), who hatch a scheme to score a free holiday. Spying the Stangle siblings on television chatting about their situation after their Craigslist ad goes viral, the just-fired waitresses try to reinvent themselves as the type of mild-mannered young women that will please Mike and Dave’s family.
In a subgenre better known for rendering males as humorously reckless and females as their responsible opposites, it doesn’t escape attention that both badly behaving duos are equally as immature as each other. And yet, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates doesn’t probe its portrayal of gender too deeply, simply presenting the shared proclivity for adolescent-like mischief as the status quo. In the absence of thoughtful commentary, what the film presents is a scenario that showcases its main quartet of actors. With Efron continuing his recent string of comic roles that playfully trade on his appearance, Devine as over-the-top as his established screen persona, Plaza acing the blend of acerbic and irreverent, and Kendrick adding a dose of realistic sweetness, none stray far from type; however what they’re known to do, they do well, and with much-needed energy.
Their efforts are largely responsible for the bulk of the movie’s laughs, apart from those that come from the now-obligatory doses of pop culture nostalgia weaved throughout the script. Further, they certainly help mask Szymanski’s lesser fortunes, with the filmmaker appearing happy for the feature to flit between big scenes — an instance of one-upmanship on all-terrain vehicles, an inappropriate massage, and a drug-fuelled animal encounter, for example — and let the banter in-between take care of itself. Perhaps that’s why Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates operates in heavy-handed territory on a technical level, with its score mining every change in emotion and its images as blandly glossy and obviously framed as the bulk of boisterous comedic offerings. When ensuring the on-screen talent do what they do best is the main aim of the film, everything around them can be merely workmanlike; here, that results in a movie can’t quite parlay its calculated brand of coasting into the cinematic revelry it aims to.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
Director: Jake Szymanski
USA, 2016, 98 mins
Release date: July 7
Distributor: Fox
Rated: MA
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