A buddy comedy with a heist — and plenty of neuroses
“Desperados” is a lot of fun and announces “Saturday Night Live” alum Nasim Pedrad as a comic actress in the tradition of Sandra Bullock.
Actually, “tradition” doesn’t quite describe it. Pedrad looks like Bullock, acts like Bullock, is funny like Bullock and even sounds like Bullock — and that’s fine. As someone who has enjoyed the real Bullock onscreen ever since “Demolition Man” (1993), I may always prefer the original, but I’m quite happy to have two of them.
In this Netflix comedy, Pedrad plays a single woman, Wesley, who can’t seem to settle into a satisfying relationship with a man. Her two best friends are married, and while they’re not entirely happily, from her perspective, their positions are enviable. Wesley’s life is a perpetual late adolescence of blind dates that go nowhere and sexual episodes that leave her, days later, ghosted and wondering what went wrong.
Then one day, Wesley meets Jared (Robbie Amell), who’s nice, goodlooking and has money. To make matters even better, he thinks she’s amazing. Curiously, he seems to have some wrong ideas about her: He thinks she’s steady and normal, when she’s actually mercurial and histrionic. But still, it’s going well enough for them to cross the Rubicon of sex, after which she doesn’t hear from him for five whole days.
“Desperados” is all about a woman desperate to unsend (or destroy) an email before her new boyfriend reads it. The email is generated in one of the movie’s best scenes. Wesley is with her two closest friends (Anna Camp and Sarah Burns), whining about being ghosted yet again. All three are drunk and get the irresistible idea to craft a revenge email.
Everything goes into it, including cruel remarks about the guy’s dead relatives and slighting comments about his genitalia.
And then, just as they’re in the process of sending it, the phone rings. It’s Jared, calling from a hospital in Mexico. He was in a serious car wreck and was unable to call for five days.
All comic plots need an engine. For “Desperados,” it’s that email. If it were merely unpleasant, it wouldn’t be enough to propel the next 85 minutes of the story. But it’s way beyond unpleasant — it’s unbelievably horrible. It’s belittling and vicious and makes her look like a complete raving lunatic. There could be no going back from that. If he reads it, the relationship is irretrievably over.
So Wesley and her friends travel to Cabo San Lucas, with the idea of breaking into the boyfriend’s hotel room so they can destroy the email.
Fortunately, “Desperados” is more than just a comic setup; it develops and builds and perpetuates itself in a series of mostly strong comic situations, all of which benefit from Pedrad’s engaging, frantic screen personality.
A further strength is that screenwriter Ellen Rapoport makes the smart choice of having Wesley’s friends be more than sounding boards. In particular, Camp goes on a journey. As Brooke, Camp plays a woman whose acerbic confidence is a cover for her anger and insecurity, and the resolution of her inner trauma becomes one of the movie’s pleasures. Heather Graham also shows up, in only a single scene, but the scene is memorable, and she’s good in it.
There are weaknesses in “Desperados,” jokes that are pushed too hard, contrivances that seem arbitrary. But if a comedy is funny, it’s 90% there, and “Desperados” is funny.