By McKenna Wierman, NDG Special Contributor
It’s been awhile since we had a good, solid wedding comedy. Honestly, “Wedding Crashers” will forever be my all-time favorite of this particular genre, but I’m willing to give just about anything a try.
“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” is a good effort, but it’s no “Wedding Crashers.” While it delivered laughs and had just the right amount of chaos for a comedy, the stupid-humor wasn’t enough to bring this movie past anything more than a run of the mill summer comedy.
The film stars the hunky heart-throb Zac Efron and goofball Adam DeVine as brothers looking for “nice girls” to take to their sister’s wedding in Hawaii. They put an ad on Craigslist, meet a few crazies and end up on the Wendy Williams show. Rough around the edges Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza) and Alice (Anna Kendrick) pursue the boys in order to trick their way into a free all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii. But Mike and Dave soon come to realize their “perfect dates” aren’t quite the “nice girls” they believed them to be.
Don’t get me wrong, this movie was funny. All admit it was, at times, outright hilarious. The message scene featuring Silicon Valley’s Kumail Nanjiani had me in stitches, and will forever haunt my dreams. I think I may have even snorted once or twice.
There were tons of “laugh out loud” moments, clever jokes and potty-humor. But sometimes it felt like the potty-humor part was never going to stop, and that got old pretty fast. Fireworks explosions and your typical party-boy/party-girl atics, were included, of course–but it’s nothing new.
As you sit and watch, everything is pretty funny and outrageous, but this movie isn’t going down in the books as the most hilarious summer comedy ever, not that anyone really expected it to. DeVine is playing the same giggling troll character he always does, and Efron is the pretty-party-boy we’ve seen him play again and again. Kendrick and Plaza are both trying too hard to act trashy and stupid, it’s almost uncomfortable to watch sometimes.
If you are looking for mindless humor, cheap laughs and 98 minutes of fun, then this movie is for you. But anything beyond that, you won’t find at this Hawaiian wedding.
“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” won’t be a classic, but it will do for a summer comedy.
