Zac Efron and Adam DeVine are ready for some serious bromance in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, which hits theaters this Friday.
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While Kendrick (Pitch Perfect) and Plaza (Dirty Grandpa) do their best to mine the comedy out of their bad-girls-go-good facade, there’s a sense of deja vu about the endless pratfalls, bridal abuse and drug-enhanced mayhem (go rent or stream the little-seen, hugely underrated and impressively cast Bachelorette for more consistent laughs on a similar subject). The impetus was Mike and Dave’s well-known reputation for ruining far too many parties and weddings – thanks to their love of insane stunts. Indeed, we are all better than this – not just the actors who portray vapid, awful people, but also we, the audience, who are stupider for having watched them. And Plaza, the film’s MYP, is killer amusing, using her delicious deadpan to eviscerate every trace of rampant male ego. The story also got the attention of Hollywood so now three years later we have, “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” – a comedy inspired by their exploits. Here in the film they had find an craigslist ad to find out dates to their cousin’s wedding, and that ad is just got viral, and the cousin has been changed into the younger sister, Sugar Lyn Beard she is playing a character of younger sister named Jeanie, and here the wedding just goes to Hawaii.
They land on The Wendy Williams Show to plead for dates.
Devine and Efron, who’s finding a nice comic groove these days, let it all hang out, sometimes literally. They con their way into an elaborate destination wedding in Hawaii that they treat as an all-expenses-paid vacation.
This time, there’s a sly difference: It’s the girls, Alice and Tatiana (Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza) who aren’t supposed to be there. From this jovial ad came not actual dates (they ended up going with a pair of women they already knew), but TV appearances, a book deal, a publicist, and a movie adaptation, with Adam Devine and Zac Efron as the title characters.
Mike and Dave Needs Wedding Dates sets out to make you laugh from start to finish, and it succeeds. In other words, it’s a flawless R-rated comedy for a summer filled with superhero and animated pictures, all perfectly safe for the kiddies.
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But unlike Wedding Crashers’ antics, which focused on two womanizers (Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn) bedding countless bridesmaids, Mike and Dave’s story is “a four-hander, and really the girls are the driving force”, says Devine. In a great tremendous opening sequence, which just puts lights on what Mike and Dave just recalled as a polite family bonding time with a awful reality.
