Crass comedy brings few laughs, just a hangover

AN UNEVEN comedy which bumps along from moderately funny to depressingly crass to plain idiotic and back again, Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates is, amazingly, based on a true story.

Three years ago, a pair of brothers advertised for two girls to take to a wedding. Their appeal went viral and lo, here we are with Adam DeVine and Zac Efron playing feckless, overgrown schoolboys Mike and Dave, who pay for Anna Kendrick (Alice) and Aubrey Plaza (Tatiana), their eager dates, to go with them to their sister’s wedding in Hawaii.

The single joke is that Alice and Tatiana, while posing as virginal goody-goodies, are even more tiresomely laddish than Mike and Dave. That’s fine, except for the fact that it renders all four main characters distinctly unlikeable. I could hardly wait to escape their boorish company, and my daughter, who at 23 is bang in the middle of this film’s target audience, felt the same.

It’s easy to see what firsttime director Jake Szymanski was trying to do. Clearly, he had in mind the likes of The Hangover, Bridesmaids and Sisters. Relentlessly coarse, irredeemably bawdy, yet funny. This film never reaches the same heights, only their depths.

And Efron needs a new agent, who doesn’t seemingly insist on a clause that he has to take his shirt off in every film. When Mike and Dave’s mother berates them for wrecking every family occasion, she says: “This schtick was cute for a while, but it’s gotten stale.” I feel exactly the same about Efron’s frat-boy act.

The humans in Todd Solondz’s singularly gloomy comedy, Wiener-Dog, are a desperately unsympathetic lot, too, but that’s the point. A wiener-dog is what Americans call a dachshund, and what better than a sausage dog to link four separate tales?

There is no connection between the characters except that at various times they all own the titular hound, who trots obligingly through the film, and even through a barking-mad mock-inter mission, projecting no particular personality.

Owners include a bickering couple (Tracy Letts and Julie Delpy) with a cancer-stricken son and a washed-up screenwriter (Danny DeVito).

The acting is brilliant and the film the kind of nigh-on unwatchable fare that you can hardly tear your eyes from. – Daily Mail