Review of Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016) by Maksim B — 05 Jan 2017

A typical college-audience oriented comedy, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates offers a raunchy humour, very likeable and sexy cast, and energy. Focused too much on the screwball effect and on how to invent nastier gags, the movie forgets that it also has to tell a story. Absurd at moments and totally clichéd, this Zac Efron-vehicle is just another perfectly forgettable and unremarkable R-rated comedy.

Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave (Zac Efron) are two hard-partying brothers who are forced to attend their sister's wedding with wedding dates. When they place an ad on the TV advertising their sister's wedding in Hawaii , they fall in the trap of the two opportunity-seeking girlfriends Alice (Anna Kendrick) and Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza). This leads to series of absurd moments and sequences which are meant to make you laugh. If you are into college and raunchy comedies you will probably have multiple moments to laugh or to at least smile. Throughout the whole movie it seems as if the cast is having actually more fun than the audience and despite the several good laughs, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates fails to escape the clichés of its sub-genre.

On top of that, the story is frankly absurd, while director Jake Szymanski clearly fails to provide the audience with something more than sexy cast and naughty laughs. The same could be said about the quality of acting. Indeed, the quartet Efron, Devine, Kendrick and Plaza are appealing enough for younger audiences, but in terms of acting there is not much that you can see. This is perfectly understandable for this type of movie, but this also makes it a comedy which you will very quickly forget.

In conclusion, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is an R-rated comedy which will partially entertain you if you are looking for a no-brainer delivery. Yet it does not offer anything meaningful in terms of a story or acting and it quickly becomes one of the movies with which you will have wasted your time. Fine if you have nothing else to do or there is nothing else to watch. Otherwise it is not worthy.