Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016)
Directed by Jake Szymanski
Mike and Dave are young, adventurous, fun-loving brothers who tend to get out of control at family gatherings. When their sister Jeanie reveals her Hawaiian wedding plans, the rest of the Stangles insist that the brothers bring respectable dates. After placing an ad on Craigslist, the siblings decide to pick Tatiana and Alice, two charming and seemingly normal women. Once they arrive on the island, however, Mike and Dave realize that their companions are ready to get wild and party.
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Indeed, the movie that eventuates is less like a case of colouring within the clear lines sketched out by other matrimony-centric attempts at cinematic hilarity such as evident precursor Wedding Crashers, and more akin to grabbing a handful of previously successful elements, throwing them into a popular template, and seeing were the pieces start to fit together — and, in some cases, where they leave gaps or push against each other.
And before you can say millennial Wedding Crashers, we're off.
The movie reaches beyond “Wedding Crashers” in raw dog terms.
There's a good reason why R-rated comedies like "Wedding Crashers" and "Bridesmaids" have been so popular and that's because weddings, as a rule, tend to be prone to hilarious chaos.
The comic riches here are enough to make this movie a fairer version of Wedding Crashers for our decade, a recommendation you can take all the way to the altar.
Credited screenwriters Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien worked on the Neighbors series, but they also crib from Wedding Crashers to the extent that the Stangles refer to the movie, and a specific plot point, directly.
They convince Mike and Dave that they’re “nice girls,” and the fortuitous foursome is off to “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” territory before you have time to sift through the gender politics.
Reminding of 2008's " Forgetting Sarah Marshall " and 2011's " Just Go with It " but not as rewarding as either of those films, "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates" deserves a smarter script and a more confident directorial hold.
It's a far-fetched concept (at one point the guys' search for dates gets them booked on the Wendy Williams show), but the crude mood it's going for is clear: A mix of "The Hangover," "Bridesmaids," "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and, especially, "The Wedding Crashers."
She puts on big serious glasses to be Mike’s date for the wedding, pretending to be a school teacher, and Plaza’s impersonation of a sweet, kind soul is so acidly perfect that it brings to mind Gillian Flynn’s description in “Gone Girl” of all the fakery that goes into acting like the Cool Girl.