Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016)

The Stangle brothers are liquor salesmen of limited impulse control, and their sister's Hawaiian wedding demands they produce respectable dates. They post a Craigslist ad. Two women who have just been fired from a waitressing job decide the free trip is worth the deception. This is the entire engine of Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, a 2016 studio comedy that has no interest in improving anyone. It wants to put four attractive people in a resort and let them misbehave. That is a legitimate ambition, if a modest one.

The film's social consciousness is incidental, the byproduct of a Hollywood casting default circa 2016. Sam Richardson appears as Eric, and minority performers fill out the supporting ranks, none of them asked to comment on their presence. A bisexual female cousin named Terry engages in a same-sex encounter, played for raunchy farce and nothing else. Identity here is a punchline, not a position. The female leads are sexually forward and drive much of the plot, which some might mistake for a feminist gesture. It is not. The camera still belongs to the brothers, and the women exist to be watched.

On the remaining indices the film registers a clean zero. There is no climate messaging, no critique of wealth or class, no body-positive framing, no neurodivergence, no revisionist history. The one thing this comedy refuses to do is lecture, and in that narrow sense it is almost admirable. It has no sermon to deliver, no lesson to impart, no audience to correct. It simply wants to be funny. It mostly is not. The result is a film that will never be accused of preaching and will rarely be accused of working.