Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

The film's premise and plot is partially based on a true story. It starts where Mike and Dave settle on two girls, Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza) and Alicia (Anna Kendrick), who turn out not to be respectable at all, but just as self-absorbed and clueless as they are. They are also just as rude, ready for alcohol, the film does evince a welcome sense of gender parity for bad behavior.

Similar to Wedding Crashers, Hollywood demands that the wedding is messed up, so no surprises there, nor in what happens afterwards. All four actors have great comic timing and their improvisation skills are tested, but within the content of the film, crude sexual gags and tastelessness hammering the same jokes over and over hold them back. This film isn't clever, witty or funny enough to warrant anything more than a one time viewing. For films such as this in which we know what it is about, it's utterly predictable and not as entertaining as it could have been. Simply put, the jokes aren't that great as to warrant consistent laughs, just light chuckles.

They think they have just made them all better parties, but to their parents and to admittedly, reality, brothers Mike (Zac Efron) and Dave (Adam Devine) have only ruined all of the family events they've participated in for their wild party style. So when its Jaine's (Sugar Lyn Beard) turn to get married the family is taking no risks: Mike and Dave are to bring wedding dates to the wedding in order to be kept at bay. That's when Alice (Anna Kendrick) and Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza) put on the façade of being nice and ordinary girls to score a free weekend in Hawaii after discovering an advert from the two brothers. Yet when the chaotic spirits of both pairs start to explode, an apparently normal weekend turns into a ludicrous series of events.

"Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates" has good and charismatic leads, with natural comedic timing and an appropriately funny cast built around them with a script that has some effortlessly funny gags working. Yet, a fair amount of laughs are not enough to surmount the film's lack of heart, which often transpires into both annoying and unmotivated sequences and humor which is close to being mean spirited.

What severely lacks from the film is a fresh and interesting comedic voice. As much as you feel the director's passion, I couldn't help but feel very cold about the style and visual choices the film makes. It is directed with almost no life, it doesn't feel alive and breathing, the shot choice is for the majority so basic it made my head ache at some point. There aren't any passages in the film where you feel inspired filmmaking and character or story being given a chance to flow. The editing is very mechanical and brings the film into feeling more like a series of gags, which might be occasionally good, but lack any kind of drive given the very predictable and clichéd script.

Still, there's no denying the talent almost everybody has for comedy and even when handed what for most is very average material they manage to elevate it and thanks to what is sure to be a lot of improvisation they make the scenes that work, work really well and transcend what are otherwise deeply problematic character development elements. Efron's career has lately been all about these R-rated comedies and I have to admit I am one who really enjoys his effort in these: he is a great screen presence and always brings a palpable irony to the scenes. Adam Devine at this point is an enigma for me, I have no idea where he'll go in the future, that is because he has some really borderline annoying stuff here, but I don't know if it's thanks to him or the gag in itself I was never brought to a breaking point. I enjoyed probably all of his beats and he had many different ones to bring alive, succeeding in all of that variety.

What is frustrating about the movie is how standard it feels and how much everything around it is striving to be better, but what we end up is this basic studio comedy that goes through every single beat we except and leaves the audience with little passion at all. The premise is right, the talent behind cast well, the script is trying to go to fresh places occasionally, but there is an incredible aura of average all around that simply flattens the film to the point of annoyance. Not to mention the ridiculous quantity of screeching women all over the place that had me almost covering my ears.

"Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates" is a film that delivers some good and at times great laughs thus succeeding a laugh prompter, yet a comedy film it lacks any depth of character or story to make it live any further than its closing credits unfortunately.

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 fiancé, 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?

(via Haus at www.parsinghaus.com)

Just watched this with my movie theatre-working friend-who had seen this before and enjoyed it-and his nephew. It's quite raunchy and has plenty of current pop culture references which I found quite funny. There's also some slapstick scenes that were also good for some laughs. There were also some touching ones. Zac Efron and Adam Devine and Audrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick fit their roles and do their stuff to mostly good effect. We're told this is based on a true story...sort of. No doubt much of what is on screen is exaggerated for comic effect. This is mainly just the kind of movie just meant to entertain though some lines do make one think of what one's destiny is. Overall, I very much enjoyed Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates was humorous and quite entertaining. It has somewhat of a plot and was enjoyable. Some scenes could have been removed however. It was thankfully not too vulgar and relied on the performances of its four main cast members to bring it home. There was great chemistry between the four, some funny moments that most audiences should laugh at and slightly sentimental too. Audrey is a natural treasure but the weakest link was Anna Kendrick who was not as funny as she was annoying. You know this film is not in the running for any Oscars but it exists to entertain and achieved that. Glad I watched it.