Mike and Dave Need
Wedding Dates (2016) – Back in April, I had a soul-crushing experience with
Dirty Grandpa, an utterly unbearable
nightmare of a movie, and so I’m not quite sure why I stayed in my seat when Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
appeared on my television screen. Actually, I know why – Dirty Grandpa has been like a bad stomach flu that I just can’t
shake, and I wanted to remind myself that Zac Efron and Aubrey Plaza weren’t to
blame. But the bad news is that Mike and
Dave, starring Adam DeVine and Efron as the titular brothers, is almost
exactly the same film as Dirty Grandpa,
with essentially the same grisly randy plot, though it is significantly less
viscerally offensive and has quantitatively more chuckles and even the
occasional laugh. The good news is that, in those moments of levity, it’s Efron
and Plaza to blame, because they’re much improved from Dirty Grandpa, if only by dint of working from a script that
doesn’t aim to offend every single decent sensibility. This is not, however, to
say that Mike and Dave is squeaky
clean, with at least two staggeringly racist jokes and a few more revolting
bouts of physical comedy, to say nothing of the jokes that fall flat on a
purely technical level. Then there’s DeVine, who seems to be trying much too
hard and has never met a joke he couldn’t mug his way through, while Anna
Kendrick really looks to be slumming it in scenes where she’s alternately depressed
or doped up. But every once in a while, Efron and especially Plaza land a solid
snicker or two, and while the film is overall a louse, the dingy light from Dirty Grandpa won’t reach it for a
million years – that’s how far from polite civilization Dirty Grandpa resides – and Mike
and Dave does pass a “five laughs” test, though it’s not memorable enough
for me to repeat most of them.That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!
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