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Movie Review: 'Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates'

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It's got a plotline trick-or-treating as a title, a first-time director, and the surface look of an exploitation flick.

Bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, right? Wrong.

Because Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates just happens to be – not constantly, but in spurts, and frequently enough – spit-out-your-popcorn hilarious.
What a pleasant, rib-tickling surprise.

It comes from debuting director Jake Szymanski, whose experience is in the realm of television and video shorts, and was written by Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O'Brien, who collaborated on the two far less amusing and accomplished Neighbors comedies.But Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates sticks to its comedic guns, dares us not to crack up, and wins us over despite all our reservations going in.

 

3
(3 stars out of 4)

 

That the makers offer their film as a true story is, given the title and subject matter, a joke itself – although it really may be the only true-to-life R-rated comedy ever made.

The claim at least establishes the film's odd autobiographical nature. It's the story of liquor-salesmen brothers Mike and Dave Stangle, played by Zac Efron and Adam Devine, not-so-juvenile delinquents who are told in no uncertain terms by their parents that, because their wild, immature, and irresponsible behavior at every family gathering results in a disaster of some kind, they must come to their younger sister's upcoming wedding with appropriate, respectable dates rather than showing up without dates, as they usually do, and hitting on all the single women at the wedding.

Because they're not familiar with the pool of women who qualify as "nice girls," per their instructions, they offer on the Internet and on television free trips to Hawaiii, where the wedding is to take place, for the women they choose to invite.

Plenty of women respond, including a hard-partying pair of friends, Alice and Tatiana, played by Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza, who do their most inspired imitation of "nice" and can give the title characters a run for their money in the immaturity and irresponsibility departments. And these pretenders get the gig, at which mayhem and chaos do what they're apt to do, especially in a wedding comedy: they ensue.

What director Szymanski perhaps gets the most credit for is knowing how to let funny performers just be funny. In this case, his concentration is on the central quartet. Plaza doesn't to much to show us anything new, but Efron, playing the most grounded of the four leads (and coming off a string of lackluster comedies) restores a bit of faith in his light-comedy chops.

But it's their co-leads who really impress. Kendrick takes it up a farcical notch and widens her playful range, while Devine comes out of nowhere – well, not nowhere, but from TV – and establishes himself virtually overnight as one enormously gifted, big-screen comic player. It is he who gets and deserves the lion's share of the belly laughs.

This is one of those raunchy summer comedies with a number of what used to be called "water cooler moments," which viewers will find themselves talking about at the office the next day, not the least of which is a truly hysterical massage scene featuring Sugar Lyn Beard as the nervous bride-to-be and Kumail Nanjiani as a worldly and limber masseuse.

Wedding Crashers seems to be the inspiration here and it's even specifically referenced. But Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates ends up carving out its own entertaining niche.

So we'll ruin 3 stars out of 4 for a screwball nuptial romp. Do I find Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates eruptively funny? I do.

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