‘Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates’ (2016) **/*****
You’re going to need an excuse to get out of this one
It’s possible that comedy is the most subjective art form there is. Laughter is a largely involuntary response to humor, so if something is able to make people laugh, it’s effective comedy. Who is anyone to say that something that makes people laugh isn’t good comedy, whether that something be a fart noise or a high-minded literary reference? All of that said, a lot of people are stupid, and they laugh at stupid things, and there are most definitely some kinds of comedy that are better than others. The best kind of comedy comes from characters that are well-developed and performers who believe in what their characters are doing and saying. We laugh because we understand who they are as people, so we know how they’re going to respond to being put in ridiculous situations. Good comedy comes from vulnerability. We watch someone humiliate themselves, or break social taboos, and that twinge of pain that our empathy for them makes us feel manifests itself in laughter, which is like a release valve that gets rid of the social anxiety that’s constantly building up inside of us. The worst kind of comedy is when people do voices.
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, which comes to us from Neighbors screenwriters Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien and a first time feature director named Jake Szymanski, is funny enough often enough that you can’t call it a complete failure as a comedy, but it’s stupid enough that it never becomes that deeper sort of character based comedy that makes for a good feature film. It’s full of funny performers, and they get plenty of funny stuff to do, but you never get the sense that they actually believe in the characters they’re playing. You never get the sense that Mike and Dave or their dates are real people. They’re winking clowns who exist only to make fools of themselves so that we can laugh at them, and they feel no shame in looking like fools, so none of that delicious vulnerability that allows the best kind of comedy to give us true belly laughs is ever generated.
The premise of the film is basically a mixture of Step Brothers and Wedding Crashers, except the main characters are younger and more attractive. Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave (Zac Effron) play a couple of screwup brothers who never grew up, and because they’re always an embarrassment at family parties, their sister (the delightful Sugar Lyn Beard) has requested that they attend her wedding in Hawaii with dates. Because if you go somewhere with a date it makes you stop being an asshole… or something. Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick play a couple of sleaze bag girls who hear about Mike and Dave’s plight on TV and decide to pretend to be respectable suitors in order to get a free trip to Hawaii, because two guys needing dates to a wedding is world news and it’s difficult for a couple of sleazy girls to trick some dope into taking them to Hawaii otherwise… or something. Look, the movie doesn’t really make much sense. It’s pretty much just an excuse for silly things to happen.
Which would be fine if enough of its silly things made you laugh. There are actually quite a few long stretches between legitimate laughs here though, despite how quickly the gags keep coming, and it’s the miss to hit ratio that makes the film feel worse than it would have felt otherwise. The problem is that all of the real laughs come from offhand quips that seem like the result of the actors riffing, and all of the stuff that’s big and physical and staged just isn’t funny at all. That piece of cartoony ridiculousness that was heavily featured in the ads where a girl is hit in the face with a flying ATV is particularly painful. It’s just so dumb and it takes so long to set up. The results are not worth whatever the film’s ATV budget was, let alone our time.
If there’s any great asset Mike and Dave has on paper, it’s the cast. All four of the principal players are funny and likable and talented, but they’re just not enough to lift the movie they’re in on their shoulders to help it limp across the finish line. As I insinuated earlier, Devine and Effron are basically doing a riff on what Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly did in Step Brothers (basically playing loud dopes who rile each other up into getting even louder and even dopier), but what separates masters like Farrell and Reilly from novices like Devine and Effron is that they’re always able to find humanity in their characters, no matter how over the top their behavior gets. Devine and Effron are funny — they have the timing and delivery to get laughs — but you never buy that they’re being genuine. They come off very much as two performers who are trying to get laughs. They’re jesters, not humans, so when the movie tries to find some heart and starts shooting for character growth in its third act, it falls on its face almost completely. At least one of them needed to play things more straight, which was probably a job for Effron. He’s done that sort of thing before while Devine has yet to thrive in anything other than comic relief roles.
The one character who remotely resembles a real human here is Kendrick’s. She’s got a trauma in her past that explains her bad behavior, and she goes through some experiences throughout the course of the film that repairs that wound a bit — which should amount to a character arc. You would think. The effort is there, but the job gets botched. Kendrick and Plaza are playing foul-mouthed drug addicts, who are irresponsible to such an extreme degree that a little bit of heartache doesn’t do enough to explain her badness, and then once she comes to a point of catharsis in the third act, it’s only committed to half-way. We get a couple of flowery speeches and then she goes straight back into clownish misbehavior. Sure, Kendrick and Plaza are funny when they’re being filthy and nihilistic, but that’s the sort of thing you look for in a crazy best friend character. The big problem with Mike and Dave is that it’s got no grounding, no protagonist who you can really relate to. It’s got four wacky sidekicks trying to yell over each other as its main characters and a bunch of physical humor that’s just not good, so eventually it feels like sitting next to a white noise machine that occasionally nails a decent improv. It’s enough to pry a few laughs out of you, but not enough to make you feel like you’ve seen a real movie.
