Alleged Beef

I went into The Wrong Missy (2020, Netflix) with preconceived notions. The hook is decent (guy meets dream girl, guy accidentally invites wrong girl to weekend getaway), but am I really going to watch a romantic comedy with David Spade as the male lead in 2020?

Stream Gems is a weekly feature where we highlight a film streaming on one of the big streaming services. No particular method to the selection, but the featured films are a) worth a watch and b) at or under two hours.

I’m not the ideal audience for Happy Madison Productions films. I find their schtick to be tiresome, since it is usually just permutations of a noisy manbaby with a wife/girlfriend who is 20+ years younger  (Father of the Year, Happy Gilmore, That’s My Boy, Growns Ups, Here Comes the Boom, Bedtime Stories, Click) or a noisy weirdo who is either hated or loved by everyone around him (Jack and Jill, Billy Madison, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, Joe Dirt).  I like lots of different comedy, but “guy is hit in nuts by a toddler and then yells in pain as we jump-cut to the next scene” doesn’t really do it for me. (My Top Movies list is almost 50% comedies if you want some examples of what does work for me.)

But I have some fondness for You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, and Grandma’s Boy is low-key good. These two movies, though, have things that most of the rest do not: actors who are good at acting who are dipping into the Adam Sandlerverse to play a role; and character-based comedy. Zohan puts John Turturro into the antagonist’s role, and Grandma’s Boy has Linda Cardellini, Doris Roberts, Shirley Knight, and Shirley Jones. In Zohan, the titular character is super duper weird but his behavior is internally consistent. Compare how Zohan interacts with other characters to how Ace Ventura behaves in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, where we aren’t watching characters interact, we are watching living dummies be shouted at and manipulated by Jim Carrey with no one ever acknowledging his boorish behavior. Maybe it is a subtle difference, but it makes the jokes land better in Zohan.

So going into The Wrong Missy, I had a few positive reviews from people I know, but the professional reviewers who I read were more bearish. And my own expectations were that I’d see a poorly edited 85-minute movie where we cut to at least one reaction shot from an animal (nope!) and at least one scene where someone is in an accident where they should die but are instead unhurt (ok, so this happens three times in The Wrong Missy). However, I couldn’t help but be excited when I watched that trailer. Lauren Lapkus is in this! Thank god, I thought, and I found myself laughing through the trailer. She’s so good in everything, from sketch comedy to TV to podcasts. Here’s the bright light that will guide me through this movie.

What I didn’t expect, though, was that both leads would put in good performances. And I didn’t expect that I’d kind of love The Wrong Missy.

David Spade is pretty good in this movie. He plays his character, Tim Morris, as kind of a sad, defeated guy who is going through the dating motions, but he is numb and risk-averse ever since his break-up with his fiancée some time in the past. So when he encounters Missy (Lapkus) on a blind date, he freaks out at her energy and her behavior (which, admittedly, includes threatening a couple with a bowie knife), and sneaks out a bathroom window to get away from her. Some time later, he has a meet-cute with another woman named Missy (Molly Sims), and the two share a very sweet moment in an airport bar (and broom closet), as they discover that they share almost everything in common from the same taste in crappy authors to a habit of ordering soda water at a bar. Goaded on by Nate from HR who is definitely bad at HR (an extremely funny Nick Swardsen), Tim begins texting Missy and eventually invites her to a corporate retreat in Hawaii. Unfortunately, Tim is texting the wrong Missy. We as viewers see the text exchange, so we realize his mistake way before Tim does.

Lapkus as Missy assumes the Chris Farley role in this film, incarnated as a force of nature in every scene. However, Lapkus gets the tone right, and it works for me. Missy is brash and pure id but she’s still a functioning adult when she isn’t cutting loose. In those hours before happy hour, she is a therapist (she’s also a masseuse and a palm reader and many other things, but the movie takes a moment to explain this). I think that the movie has a tough tightrope to walk in making her feel like a complete maniac while also making her be the romantic lead, but they just pull it off. It almost fails a few times, though: Tim wakes up to being sexed on by Missy twice in the movie by, which I think is a mistake in the writing (imagine how you would feel if the roles were reversed in those scenes and Missy was the one waking up to find that she’s being penetrated). I also think that the Bowie knife gag is tonally inconsistent for Missy, but it does set up a very solid joke involving Missy’s email address.

Anyway, Tim waits patiently for his date, sitting in his plane bound for Hawaii, and he is mortified when manic Missy shows up, not Molly Sims Missy. But he is risk-averse, as I mentioned earlier, so he doesn’t tell her that there was a mistake, but instead and just sort of retreats inward as they get to the hotel. What follows is a weekend of scenes where Missy runs roughshod over the employees of the investment company. She takes particular aim at the new boss Jack Winstone (a delightful Geoff Pierson), as she wants to help Tim’s career. There may be some hypnotism involved, people. And there may be a scene involving mermaid costumes.

Over the course of the weekend, though, Tim starts to realize that Missy is free in ways that he is not, and that her energy is something very much lacking in his life. I mean, this guy is so lonely that he asks his GrubHub delivery driver to hang out: Missy is just what he needs. Further, Tim and the characters around Missy acknowledge her manic behavior, which is a huge improvement from the usual way these Happy Madison movies go.

We get some more very funny moments with Nick Swardsen’s character invading Tim’s privacy. We get Jackie Sandler as Tim’s office rival nicknamed The Barracuda, delivering the obligatory reveal of Tim’s mistake, so that we have the “ok, now the lovers are sad for two scenes” part of the story. The corporate talent show had me laughing almost nonstop, and it even included a callback that seemed atypical for a Happy Madison movie (“It looks like they are shooting lemons out of their asses.”). Rob Schneider shows up as a local shark-boat captain with some missing fingers, and he gets a couple of very funny scenes. Sarah Chalke, despite not being in the trailer at all, plays Tim’s ex-fiancee and is used well as a contrast to Missy: she really knows Tim, and the limits of his comfort zone, and she can see that Missy is pushing him way outside those bounds. I like the addition of her character here. Again, these characters are mostly internally  consistent, and they engage with the other characters around them (mostly) like human beings. And the comedy springs from this.

Anyway, the requisite romantic comedy ending is limited to the last 10 minutes, and “the right Missy” shows up just for two scenes, so the movie is able to get through its plot in 90 minutes flat. That’s about the outer limit on run times for this kind of thing.

I recommend The Wrong Missy. I laughed through the entire movie. I thought that Lapkus and Spade were quite excellent, and I chuckle every time I think about the hypnotized boss gagging when someone mentions the Barracuda.