The Wrong Missy

I will give Netflix some credit, they sure know how to make trailers. When I saw the premise for this film, I thought, Oh that's just a generic romantic comedy that I know how it's gonna end and it's probably not gonna be good. But the trailer won over not only me, but some friends and family that I didn't really expect to be won over by this film. Eventually I gave it a try.

The Wrong Missy follows the story of David Spade... I mean Tim Morris (played pretty generically by David Spade, if you've seen a David Spade performance, you've seen this one). He is middle management at a banking company and he is competing for a promotion with another manager by the name of Jess (played by Jackie Sandler).

He also recently experienced a serious break up when his fiance (played by Sarah Clarke) cheated on him. In an attempt to get back on the horse, he goes on a blind date that goes horribly with a woman by the name of Missy (played by Lauren Lapkus). Missy is obnoxious, she carries around a bowie knife, she does voices, she clearly has a drinking problem, and Tim rightly decides that this is not going to work out.

Three months later, right before a big corporate retreat to Hawaii, he meets a woman who is incredibly out of his league by the name of Melissa (played by Molly Sims). The two hit it off but she needs to catch a flight. She tells him that she'll give him her contact information.

Tim decides to make a bold move and invites Melissa to the corporate retreat, but accidentally invites Missy.

And shenanigans ensue. A romantic comedy unfolds with Tim dealing with this obnoxious woman he mistakenly invited while still trying to get the promotion at work.

What I wrote is essentially the first 15 minutes of the film. That seems like a lot but they blow past it actually pretty skillfully in the movie. For a lot of reasons, this film shouldn't work in the first fifteen minutes but for some reason it does. It is clear that the "right" Missy is out of Tim's league, and yet they do share some funny chemistry that works better than I think the film expected. The "wrong" Missy is obnoxious in a way that could be irritating but again, for the purpose for the set up, it's done really well in the set up.

And the character of Missy for the first part of the film is actually done pretty well to be an obnoxious, over the top person that nobody wants to be around. She's done almost too well.

If you've watched an romantic comedy, you can probably guess that there's a sweet underbelly to her obnoxious fascade and there's a certain turn in the movie where David Spade falls in love with her.

But that turn is horribly done in this film. Just horribly... horribly done.

Also, the way the set up was established, it built up Molly Sims character really well as someone that Tim could connect with that it doesn't make sense why he decides to fall for Missy.

The comedy in the film is pretty typical to a Happy Madison produced film. The situations are pretty over the top, Rob Schneider is in it for no reason other than to keep him employed, and at a certain point its not going to be charming anymore.

That's what happened in this film. It started off pretty grounded and started to escalate. It's raunchy but again, it started off pretty well... until about half way through the film where Missy is hypnotizing Tim's boss into thinking that he's his nana and he should give him a promotion. And that's supposed to be the charming turn where Tim decides that he likes Missy. It's all very confusing.

A couple other sides notes, everyone does a pretty good job in this film regardless of the way the movie is written. Like I said David Spade plays the same straight man character he's played for decades, Lauren Lapkus is pretty off puttingly funny almost to a fault. Sarah Clarke didn't need to be in this film. And Nick Swardsdon plays the best friend character and is criminally underutilized. There's a whole side thing where he works in HR and is screening all David Spade's emails and texts and that's actually pretty funny.

Overall, there's a lot of ways this movie could have gone. The premise is pretty decent and builds for some pretty funny comedy. But when the movie takes the typical turns, it loses a lot of steam. There's also a very unique tonal dissonance in the film where certain things are supposed to be played off as romantic, or funny, or charming, and instead they come off as weird because the character of Missy continues to be a psycho.

I think a lot of the credit goes to Lauren Lapkus in this film because she did her character almost too well. The result is a movie that starts off strong, but peeters out near the end because the characters seemed to break out of the conventional cookie cutter mold of this romantic comedy story. It does not stick the landing.

But those are my thoughts on The Wrong Missy. I have been watching a lot of TV as well as some documentaries in case any of you were wondering why its been so sparse recently. I'm hoping to get to more reviews here soon so be patient if you're still out there. In the mean time you can let me know what you thought of this film by commenting and discussing below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future, I will get to them post haste. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

Thanks for reading!