Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

Inspired by true events, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates follows title characters Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave (Zac Efron) as they place an online ad to find acceptable escorts for their sister’s (Sugar Lyn Beard’s Jeanie) tropical wedding – with the siblings’ plan taking a nosedive after two incredibly questionable girls (Anna Kendrick’s Alice and Aubrey Plaza’s Tatiana) answer the posting. The degree to which Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates ultimately alienates the viewer is nothing short of shocking, to be sure, given that the movie opens with a fair amount of promise and boasts a talented roster of charismatic actors. (The supporting cast includes, in terms of the latter, Stephen Root, Jake Johnson, and Kumail Nanjiani.) It doesn’t take long, unfortunately, for the film to establish its less-than-competent, painfully over-the-top sensibilities, as director Jake Szymanski, working from Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien‘s screenplay, elicits aggressively exaggerated performances that are compounded by an ongoing emphasis on broad (yet completely unfunny) situations and sequences. (Where, for example, are the laughs in a punishingly long interlude in which Jeanie receives an overtly sexual massage from Nanjiani’s Keanu?) There’s little doubt, then, that Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates grows more and more insufferable as it progresses, with the predictably (and ludicrously) saccharine bent of the film’s third act ensuring that the whole thing fizzles out to a disastrous extent – which, naturally, confirms the movie’s place as a misguided, misbegotten misfire of epic proportions.

* out of ****