“This shtick was cute for a while, but now it’s getting stale,” complains Mike (Adam DeVine) and Dave’s (Zac Efron) mum as she laments the brothers’ wild behaviour. It’s hard not to agree.

After a promising opening montage, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates then proceeds to relentlessly throw everything it thinks might be funny at the audience in the hopes that something will stick. Mixing slapstick humour with a heavy reliance on improvisation from as many wacko characters as possible, this is a 98-minute mess of a summer flick.

Alice (Anna Kendrick) is the most well-rounded lead, and her backstory – being jilted at the altar – pays off in some fairly funny moments where she is ‘triggered’ at the central wedding. This actually gives the audience some connection to the character and makes her more likeable in her attempts to add to the festivities. Tatiana, on the other hand, is the opposite and a waste of Aubrey Plaza’s talents; a two-dimensional ‘party girl’ whose main reason for existing seems to be for Mike and his female cousin Terry to fight over her.

The film meanders through its routine of visual gags and vague pop culture references for an hour or so, before making the last 30 minutes drag horrendously by insisting on shoehorning in an emotional speech for each main character as they ponder whether their sister’s wedding will be saved. To be honest, you just want them all to go home so that you can too.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates produces some chuckles here and there, but it’s ultimately a tired reshuffling of the structure of greater comedies past, and the material intended to be outrageous feels flat because of it. There’s only so many generic dick jokes the public can take.

RATING: 2/5

INFORMATION

CAST: Zac Efron, Adam DeVine, Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick

DIRECTOR: Jake Szymanski

WRITERS: Andrew Jay Cohen, Brendan O’Brien

SYNOPSIS: Wild and frequent family-gathering-ruiners Mike and Dave are duped into taking the equally-wild Alice and Tatiana to their sister’s wedding in Hawaii under the guise that they are nice, respectable girls.