1/22/2017 - Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016) – 3/10

What Mike and Dave need to have done was to have parsed out a more humorous script, appealed to something other than the most clichéd & gratuitously base/5th grader comedy, and strove for humanity & empathy, not crass sociopathic morons and quarter-note plotless assholes. M and D’s matrimony was to churlishness, repetition, and failed bits. Party favors in the form of eye rolls and exasperated sighs were doled out instead of rib-splitting gags and interesting ongoings. Maybe I checked the wrong box on the invite…

There are the occasional chuckles in here, along with some real comedic potential. Efron is getting better at his comic interplay and Devine, Kendrick, & Plaza are all extremely likable/fun. Unfortunately, if you are not a brain-dead selfish loser (the boys) then you are a non-empathetic conniving manipulative monster (the girls) – none of which I found particularly likable or stimulating. This was a group of awful people, doing bad things for bad reasons, all barely justifiable and even less amusing. I can get behind people I don’t care for squeezing jocular blood from a jaundiced stone, but this was often stale, cheap, and dreary. Rely on wit and playful & invested pathos, not prop merkins, crude philandering, and unending asininity.

My expectations were low for this, and my forecast approximation turned out to be completely justified. This is a poor film, despite good prospective elements, because so little works like it should. The jokes are too easy and dull. The characters too crass and uninteresting. The story lacked imagination or real gusto. Despite sparse moments of gaiety scraped from the marred carcass of this rom-com rompscapade, this one never consummated the union between intended snicker and legitimate guffaw.