Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016), R, ★★★

Adam Devine and Zac Efron as young wedding crashers.

When you arrive at a wedding, there is always going to be that one misanthrope that will cause damage into a newlywed's grand event that will be a memory for the rest of your lives...in somewhat of a bad way. Trust me...without going into any details...I have witnessed this and it did not well for the guest. Moving along, a comedy surround mischievous and childish people causing trouble for both themselves and the guests can be tricky to attempt because how much humor can be played into their issues surrounding an event? I went into this movie with somewhat low expectations and some of the material was a bit repetitive and raunchy and went into familiar territory, but for some reason, I grinned and laughed enough to consider it a potential guilty pleasure.

Mike and Dave Stangle (Adam Devine and Zac Efron) are brothers who have a liquor business that are party animals. Their parents, Burt and Rosie (Stephen Root and Stephanie Faracy) call them together to meet with them and their sister, Jeanie (Stephanie Beard) and her fiancee, Eric (Sam Richardson). After Burt shows them a slideshow of all the family events that Mike and Dave ruined regarding some fireworks and a girl getting injured, Burt demands that they bring dates to their sister's wedding. The brothers initially decline but respectively accept later for Jeanie.

Mike and Dave place an ad to get dates, with tons of responses because of the promise of a free trip to Hawaii. They interview many girls but the brothers do not find them respectable enough. We meet Alice and Tatiana (Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza) who are best friends and waitresses but are troublemakers. The ladies catch Mike and Dave on "The Wendy Williams Show" on television and they decide to clean up and look "respectable as f**k".

Tatiana hatch a plan to get the brothers' attention by jumping in front of a moving car. Alice calls for help and Mike performs CPR on Tatiana and saved her life. After an awkward conversation in a bar, Mike and Dave invite them to Hawaii and Alice and Tatiana accept. When they get to Hawaii, Alice and Tatiana charm the pants out of the brothers' relatives. During an ATV ride, Mike approaches to perform a stunt but because his vehicle cannot be controlled, he hits Jeanie in the face, resulting in a nasty bruise. That's one of many jokes in the movie.

There's a lot of trouble in this picture.

This is a silly R-rated comedy that has so much familiar territory that you have to turn your brain off and have a good time with these sort of likable slackers. We have to rely on gags, pratfalls and profane dialogue to come across as a label of comedy that most of the time, the jokes work. One of the funniest scenes is when a masseuse gives Jeanie a massage while naked but Mike walks in screaming and has to talk to Dave about the situation which ties into a story surrounding their parents.

Zac Efron and Adam Devine are comically solid at times but are not consistent as Efron becomes manic and some of his humor does not work and Devine screams and freaks out in certain areas. But, it is Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza that steal the movie because their timing with each other are sometimes impeccable. But, Plaza's deadpan humor is what is hilarious that tramples everybody else's performances.

It is not a special comedy that people will revisit because of so much of the raunchy humor and also, the predictable drama in which the brothers find out what Alice and Tatiana were up to and the way the filmmakers and writers ended the movie did not work. This is a formulaic comedy, however, it pushes most of the hilarious buttons in me. Director Jake Szymanski sets up some humorous scenes quite well that even though, you know the payoff, the build-up is pretty solid to say the least. Comedy is subjective, especially raunchy, that this is one of those formulaic raunchy comedies that worked for me for some odd reason.

***