Film Review:
The Wrong Missy

The irksome David Spade is the star here, a guy who can barely get cast anywhere outside his bestie Adam’s pics, and as he’s 56 this year, you’d think that he’s too old for this sort of grisly carry-on. And he’s not the only one.

Tyler Spindel directs this preposterous tale of an uptight sales exec named Tim Morris (Spade), who goes on an improbable blind date with Missy, and she’s portrayed by Lauren Lapkus, an all-purpose comic type that always plays big but here opts for even bigger. It’s the kind of dismally unfunny characterisation you’d expect in this sort of ghastly material, and it would be all a bit misogynist if it wasn’t so absurd.

Sometime after that Tim meets glam Melissa (Molly Sims) at an airport, leading to a highly unlikely sexy interlude in an empty room and raunchy texts exchanged later. Tim invites her along for a Hawaii work retreat and, lo and behold, it’s not revealed until they’re on the plane that he’s actually been unwittingly communicating with the loopy Missy, a hopelessly contrived twist that would never happen in real life but is necessary to make the dire story grind along.

Missy shocks and embarrasses Tim’s friends and colleagues at first, but after a while she starts to win them over with her in-your-face nonsense, and Tim eventually finds himself somehow (somehow!) falling for her too despite her horrific behaviour leading to him nearly being eaten by an FX shark, just for starters. And what a motley mob Tim’s friends and colleagues are: there’s chummy Nate (the appalling Nick Swardson); formidable boss Jack Winstone (the grizzled Geoff Pierson); and tough superior Jess (a.k.a. ‘The Barracuda’), who’s played by Adam Sandler’s wife Jackie Sandler, an awfully unflattering part for anyone’s spouse.

And if you thought that gruesome old Rob Schneider was going to miss out on all this, um, ‘fun’ then you’re wrong, although Steve Buscemi (yet another of Sandler’s BFFs) was oddly unavailable for this one. And lucky for some.

But, again, what did you expect? Originality? Wit? Narrative sense? Emotional resonance? Complex roles for women that reflect progressive contemporary feminist attitudes? Come on! This is a Happy Madison movie and therefore strictly for punters out there who will laugh at anything.

The Wrong Missy (MA) is now streaming on Netflix