The Wrong Missy Review

When straitlaced salesman Tim Morris (David Spade) has a classic meet-cute with a girl named Missy (Molly Sims), he spontaneously invites her to his company’s corporate retreat in Hawaii. At least, he would have, if he hadn’t texted a different Missy (Lauren Lapkus) — a live-for-the-moment loose cannon who catapults the weekend, and Tim’s life, into crazy town.

If you’ve seen any of Adam Sandler’s Netflix ‘comedies’ and wondered what scripts he turned down might look like, the Sandler-backed dumpster fire Father Of The Year, in which David Spade does a passable Sandler impression, was a pretty good guide. Now, Spade and director Tyler Spindel have reunited for another Sandler-produced, Netflix-bankrolled comedy, and the results are… surprisingly funny.

Written by Chris Pappas and Kevin Barnett, who paired Spade and Sandler for The Do-Over, The Wrong Missy begins with a disastrous blind date in which Tim meets Missy #1 (Lauren Lapkus). Three months later, Tim has sworn off dating until he meets Missy #2 (Molly Sims), and spontaneously invites her to Hawaii for the weekend. When the wrong Missy shows up, things go from awkward to hellish in the space of about two minutes 123Movies flat.

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Lauren Lapkus makes Missy a fully-rounded, mostly believable, one-of-a-kind mischief-maker.

Somehow, it’s all made believable by Lapkus (Jurassic World), probably best known as Stu’s nerdy girlfriend in The Big Bang Theory. Missy could so easily have been written, or performed, as the kind of dress-over-the-head drunken party girl that’s been a staple of crappy comedies for decades. Instead, Lapkus makes her a fully-rounded, mostly believable, one-of-a-kind mischief-maker whose firebrand nature sometimes means she takes things too far, but only to make life a little bit more bearable for herself and others. And no thank you, male comedy writers, she doesn’t need to be “tamed”.

Tim may be a thousand miles out of his comfort zone, but Spade is well within his, being at his best when he’s playing the straight man, as he did with Chris Farley in the ’90s. Not all of the jokes or set-pieces land, but the hit rate is high, and although some of the humour is crude, it’s never mean-spirited — a rarity in a Sandler production. Also — who’d have thunk? — the Rob Schneider cameo is hella funny.