Movie Review: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

Good-natured yet deliriously dirty (and somehow based on a true story), Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is probably the only good thing to ever come of Craigslist.

“We’re both in our 20s, single, dashingly tall, Anglo-Saxon, respectfully athletic, love to party, completely house trained, relaxed, passionate, smell great, have cool hair, clean up nice, boast great tie collections, will promise to shave, love our mother, have seen Love Actually several times, controversial, provocative, short-sighted (with a big picture mentality), raw, emotional, sensitive but still bad boys.”

That’s how Mike and Dave Stangle’s Craiglist ad seeking respectable dates for a family wedding reads, and no, I’m not talking about in the fantasy world of modern American cinema, where sweet doofuses can romance adorkable women over social media without seeming creepy (or like an actual physical threat).

Mike and Dave are real people who posted a real Craigslist ad that was turned into a real movie that resulted in them getting paid real dollars. (And you thought Emojimovie was a flimsy property for adaptation.)

However, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, unlike its skeezy inspiration, is a delight; warm, spirited and frequently hilarious. It also keeps dozens of your favourite comedians and bit players well-salaried (including Stephen Root, Kumail Nanjiani and Sam Richardson), thanks to its generous sharing of the comedy load.

That generosity extends beyond the endearingly dumb Mike (Workaholics’s adorable psychopath Adam DeVine) and Dave (the increasingly-reliable, doe-eyed goofball Zac Efron), to its female leads.

Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza rule over the picture and their male counterparts as Alice and Tatiana, the reckless whirligigs who fool the Stangles into taking them to Hawaii for their sister’s wedding, only to reveal on the island that they’re not “nice girls” for their parents to fawn over at all, but human hurricanes. They’re manic pixie dreamgirls, without the ‘pixie dreamgirls’ part. Their ‘fairy dust’ is the illicit kind.

The other comic force to be reckoned with is Sugar Lyn Beard as the bride to be, Jeanie Stangle, who winds up as impressionable fodder for Alice and Tatiana.

The three of them twist and contort their voices – Kendrick slurs; Plaza goes brassy; Beard chirps – until they sound like cartoon characters, and then spend the third act making you buy them as real, relatable human beings again. Usually, Hollywood only allows Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis to pull these kinds of moves. When you watch a flick such as this – where the “straight men” pale next to their female co-stars – you wonder how Hollywood got away with it for so long.

Of course, the gender parity doesn't go beyond those on camera. The director is Jake Syzmanski (of HBO’s devilish short 7 Days In Hell) and the writers are Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien (the woke baes who gave us the similarly subversive Bad Neighbours II .)

The filmmakers at least offer a light enough touch to let their charismatic stars steal all the credit, and I'm presuming improvised punchlines were in heavy supply with this cast. Syzmanski instead makes his mark with some frenetic montages, particularly one concerning a masseur who transcends our worldly plane and also basic social mores with his touch.

At its heart (and it has a big one), Mike and Dave Needs Wedding Dates is about a group of twenty-somethings who want to be better people, which is the politest way I can justify its grossest set pieces. But who needs justification when they’re so viscerally funny?

And then, when the credits roll after a whip-fast 98 minutes, we get some bloopers to boot. Icing on the cake.

4/5

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is now in cinemas.