Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates had a good soundtrack and kept me entertained.
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They took some time out of their busy schedule to pay a visit to Sydney Swans HQ for a kick-to-kick.
“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” is a film very loosely based on the story of two party bros who placed a Craigslist ad looking for dates to a wedding.
Zac Efron and Adam DeVine can individually cause crowds to project deafening screams similar to the wails expressed by a prepubescent boy happening upon a huntsman near his foot while on the can.
Then it was time for a photo opp and kick at goal.
First-time director Jake Szymanski gets trapped in the more-is-more cycle of piling on gross gags and manic overconsumption but, in between, he comes up with some solid laughs, especially a brilliantly amusing bit from Kumail Nanjiani as Jeanie’s anxious-to-please New Age masseuse, Keanu. But they are actually frequently drunken, underachieving barmaids Alice (Kendrick), who tells lies badly and has been jilted at the altar, and her sexually rampant best friend Tatiana (Plaza). And Plaza, the film’s MYP, is killer amusing, using her delicious deadpan to eviscerate every trace of rampant male ego.
The film jumps from the Stangle brothers’ relationship to Alice trying to get over an ex to Alice and Tatiana’s friendship to Tatiana’s personal growth to Mike and Dave’s separate growth to Jeanie and Alice’s friendship until the whole thing becomes just as cluttered as this sentence.
Summer, in particular, has treated raunchy larks like “The Wedding Crashers” better than fair and proven that there is an audience for a certain degree of over-the-top crudeness that you can’t really get away with anywhere but a movie screen. Adam Devine and Zac Efron star as brothers Mike and Dave, respectively. The “Dirty Grandpa” star plays Dave Stangle in the film. They are bombarded with responses and proceed to audition a variety of candidates in a amusing sequence reminiscent of a speed-dating exercise gone very wrong.
DeVine, pretending to be Efron, emphatically agreed. The characters are likable and amusing, plus the event itself is glitzy and fun.
Zac Efron said that he had to learn an Australian accent for his character in this movie and he admitted this fact that becoming an Australian and nailing the character was a very hard job for him. The film doesn’t build enough character beyond the initial amusing people to have us necessarily care about when it tries to become serious with their actual problems.
There are many ways to make a great comedy and many different subjects that you can cover in doing so.
Efron’s Australian accent is quite convincing in the Jake Szymanski-directed movie “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”. Getting a laugh or two, with a talented cast, is easy; making a good movie, it turns out, is haaaard.
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In the end, “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” is serviceable in the moment, but doesn’t leave that much of a lasting impression.
