Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

I’ve been a critic now for about a decade now, and my takeaway from years of film-watching is that I’m no longer amazed by the endless ways in which movies can be awful. After a century of moviemaking, you’d think the industry would’ve gotten closer to a more consistent sense of perfection. Instead, it seems to have ambled to the other end of the spectrum, where cinema’s great Platonic ideal is actually to be as loud, grating and dumb as possible. The universe tends towards entropy, after all.

Or perhaps I’m just pessimistic. A film such as Jake Szymanski’s Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates has a tendency to do this to one’s outlook on life. Look, this isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, it’s just maybe the most forgettably awful movie I’ve sat through (though, to be honest, I’ve forgotten about the other contenders). It has all the earmarks of being truly terrible — it’s loud, obnoxious and generally brain-dead — but Mike and Dave is particularly generic type of monstrosity. It’s a big, dumb comedy in the tradition of a Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000) or Step Brothers (2008) but without the overt strangeness of either film. Even the romcom foundation that Mike and Dave is built upon plays into the worst tendencies of that long-exhausted genre’s cliches.

The film’s great contribution to the dumb buddy comedy is to add another pair of dumb buddies to the situation. Adam Devine and Zac Efron respectively play the titular Mike and Dave, two brothers who are none too bright. Well, Dave might be, but he tends to get wound up around Mike, leading the duo to fits of destruction. With their little sister Jeanie’s (Sugar Lyn Beard, 50/50) wedding coming up and their father (Stephen Root) fearing the worst, the brothers are given an ultimatum: Find “nice girls” to bring to the wedding who’ll keep them in check  or be uninvited. After a slew of bad dates (which allows the movie to indulge in some casual transphobia and homophobia) and their Craigslist ad going viral, the two are fooled into taking Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza) and Alice (Anna Kendrick). I say “fooled” because they’re actually recently fired waitresses and general screwups who manage to pass themselves off as the aforementioned “nice girls” so they can get a free trip to Hawaii out of the whole thing.

Mike and Dave follows two distinct paths at this point, as the two couples manage to screw things up for Jeanie through a series of garish slapstick set pieces punctuated by general loud talking and random nonsense. There’s eventually an amount of intelligent self-awareness in the characters, and there are a few genuinely funny moments, but they’re small and pass quickly, seeming only to offset how ill-advised the rest of the film can be. A lot of it feels like things ripped from a billion other bad movies and sitcoms, and it’s all shot like a beer commercial from the ’90s. The fact that Mike and Dave, with its bevy of B- and C-list stars and flat jokes, will never truly linger in one’s mind is its sole redeeming factor. Rated R for crude sexual content, language throughout, drug use and some graphic nudity.