Two wrongs fail to make Missy right
The Wrong Missy
(16+, 90 mins) Directed by Tyler Spindel Reviewed by James Croot ★★
Three months on and Tim Morris (David Spade) still hasn’t forgiven his grandma for setting him up on a blind date. Sure, he needed something to get him out of his funk after his fiance left him, but nothing could prepare him for his nightmare encounter with Missy (Lauren Lapkus).
Attempting to escape her highoctane barrage of crude jokes, oversharing and picking fights with other patrons, Tim is left with a fractured ankle and serious psychological trauma.
But while he throws himself into his Credit of America job, ordering food deliveries and bingewatching The Affair, a rare opportunity for promotion comes when the company enters a merger.
Buoyed by being one of just two in the running for the role, Tim’s spirits are lifted further when he literally runs into Melissa (Molly Sims) at the airport. While a luggage and boarding pass mix-up mean they both miss their flights, the pair discover they have plenty in common, with a supply room cupboard hook-up only thwarted by her having another plane to catch. However, with her having given him her number, he’s already planning a hook-up.
After a quick text reconnection, Tim decides to be bold and ask if she’ll be his date to the company’s corporate retreat in Hawaii. After all, surelywouldn’t having a former Miss Maryland and allAmerican tennis player on his arm impress his new boss enough to secure him his coveted job? To his delight, she says yes. But it isn’t until she sits down on the seat next to him on the plane that he finds he’s been texting the wrong Missy.
Gross-out gags, Rob Schneider gurning for Africa, gorgeous Hawaiian locations. Yes, all the warning signs of an Adam Sandlerbacked comedy are present and correct. However, this fitfully funny farrago makes 50 First Dates
look like a classic, and Just Go With It halfway decent.
Amovie very much in the spirit of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but without its charismatic casting and writing, this feels like an older skewing version of 2016’s Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates married to the old 1960s sitcom episode staple of ‘‘panic ensues when the boss announces he’s coming around for dinner’’. If you didn’t think they made these kind of gleefully un-pc, sexist, shallow flicks any more, you were wrong – they just screen on the likes of Netflix now.
With humour as subtle as a brick, The Righteous Gemstones’
writers Chris Pappas and Kevin Barnett create ‘‘comedy gold’’ out of physical disabilities, vomiting in a shark tank, and a Merman outfit. Those familiar with the Team Sandler-subgenre will know to expect amusic celebrity cameo, marijuana jokes and pratfalls. And, of course, there’s an attempt to stick a sweet, schmaltzy ending at odds with all that’s gone before.
But in a tale where Spade ( Father of the Year, TV’S Just Shoot Me) truly struggles as the straight man, and his hairpiece and hangdog demeanour make him look like Edward Norton’s sadder cousin, there is one shining light. Orange is the New Black star Lapkus truly commits to her character. Wideeyed and full-throttle, her ‘‘ maniac
pixie dream girl’’ not only steals the movie, she almost saves it.
Proving equally adept at physical and verbal comedy, Lapkus is at the centre of The Wrong Missy’s
few laugh-out-loud moments, be it a disastrous clifftop dive or hypnotising Tim’s boss. Let’s just hope her next project is more worthy of her undoubted talents.
The Wrong Missy is now streaming on Netflix.