Review of Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016) by Michael L — 21 May 2017

The most important thing for a comedy to do is make you laugh. And at the end of the day, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates made me laugh. A lot of these R-rated comedies nowadays really don't do it for me, because they seem to just be jumping on the bandwagon of the Judd Apatow crews success. I Love You Man and Friends With Kids were fine, but did they need to be rated R? Not at all, and it felt forced. Here, ho-yah, this is an R-rated comedy through-and-through.

It's outrageous, graphic, vulgar, and I loved it for that. It's a frankly absurd concept pushed to the furthest levels of it's absurdity. It also manages to combine a bunch of really funny people I love. Adam DeVine is better than ever here, and Zac Effron continues to prove he can actually be a really funny guy. As for the girls, Anna Kendrick is great, I love her, but Aubrey Plaza didn't really do it for me. I'm still waiting for her to do a role that's as deep and funny as her role on Parks and Rec, and I've still yet to see it. Here, she's mostly just serviceable. I will also say that all four of them do have really great chemistry with each other. I actually bought Effron and DeVine as brothers, which is just nuts. I feel like this must have been a really fun movie to film, because they all look like they're having a great time.

The plot is basically nonexistent. It's more like there's a premise, a set-up for a series of jokes, and then they just throw as many of those jokes at you as they can. There's a couple turns near the final act of the movie, but nothing lasting, and there's no real significant character development. It's really just an excuse for these four funny people to hang out and make you laugh as often as they can. And in that sense, it works about as well as you could hope it to.

This isn't really a great movie. When I think about the great comedies of our time, I doubt I'm going to think of Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. It is however a lot funnier than most comedies out there now, so for a one-time viewing of something silly to make you laugh, it works.