The Wrong Missy is a 2020 comedy about a man who thinks he’s invited the woman of his dreams on a work retreat to Hawaii, realizing too late he mistakenly texted someone from a nightmare blind date.
David Spade is not a leading man. I think he knows that. We all do. He’s better as the straight man, and best when starring in a television ensemble sitcom from the late 1990s. Don’t get me wrong. I like David Spade, the same way I like that half used bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup in the back of the frig I stumble upon every once in a while while digging for something different. I knows it’s delicious and holds lots of potential for tasty good times, but I usually got nothin’ right then that it goes good with. If Spade’s got nothing good to go with … well, you get what I mean.
His latest project, aside from trying to keep his admittedly smart and funny offbeat talk show Lights Out With David Spade up and running, is a new Netflix original film called The Wrong Missy, a mix-up comedy with a plot point from fifty years ago wrapped up in the leftovers of an Adam Sandler playbook. And dang, I honestly was going to try my hardest to get through this without referring once to Adam Sandler but, I guess it was sort of inevitable.
The story follows a fifty-something business type named Tim (Spade) hankering for a promotion in a job where his boss only knows him by a wrong name. Tim does good work though and is at the moment in direct competition for moving up against a woman known as ‘The Barracuda’, a sassy go-getter named Jess (Jackie Sandler). Meanwhile, Tim’s lovelife is fairly flat, somewhat recently broken up with Julia (Sarah Chalke – who is painfully wasted here) until he meets a girl at the airport. She’s Melissa (Molly Sims), an attractive former beauty queen who seems to be his soulmate, leading them to a makeout session in a janitor’s closet and promises to hook up later when they return from their flights.
All good, except prior to this, using a dating website, Tim had himself one of those classic only-in-the-movies blind dates from hell nights with a young woman named … wait for it … Missy (Lauren Lapkus), a woman so off her rocker, Tim tried to escape through a bathroom window. Either way, he parted ways with her, hoping never to crash into her again, but, of course, as these things must happen, when he aims to invite Melissa to Hawaii on a company retreat, he ‘accidently’ begins a text session with Missy instead, only realizing his error when he’s already on the plane waiting when in walks the girl of his nightmares.
Now on the shores of paradise, while trying to impress his boss into giving him a new job, he’s got a maniac on his elbow, whom he believes is going to epically ruin his chances for success. In any sane world, that would be right, but since this is an Adam Sandler com… er, David Spade comedy, she ends up being the very thing Tim needs in re-kickstarting his life and making everything work out. You didn’t see that coming did you. Of course you did.
Okay, surely, it leaves on the cutting room floor most of the gross out and borish gags you might expect from this farmyard of movies that tend to release stories orbiting around flatulence, vomiting, misogyny, and such. Spade has always been a likeable loser and he plays into it well enough, sporting a bad haircut and his trademark dopey disposition. The star of all this though is, naturally, Lapkus, who is sort of a onenote actress, but one that absolutely excels at making that her thing. She’s got an impressive catalog of appearances in movies and television but is a grandmaster at using her gangly yet greatly appealing stature to some intersting comic timing. If you haven’t seen the short-lived series The Earliest Show, stop what you’re doing and seek it out because she is superb.
Here, she does waht she can to carry this most often ill-fitting and hapless movie to the end, the jokes and pratfalls never all that funny and then stretched to the point of saggy from the start. Interestly enough, Spade and Lapkus are a good team, yet the film isn’t looking to building on that relationship beyond she embarrassing him while we’re supposed to fall for her. Problem is, she’s terribly unlikable from her introduction, the predictable turnaround not all that well earned because she is so caustic in public it’s uncomfortable, meaning it’s hard to see the wonder she might possess given a better script – one that has her falling off cliffs, puking into the sea, violently twerking in inappropriate places, and hitting on Vanilla Ice. Yes. That Vanilla Ice because you know, why not?
When it’s over, it’s over and you learn nothing, feel nothing, and before the credits roll are already thinking what to watch next. It turns out that by the last frame, it’s Lapkus who is the Hershey’s syrup, most likely forgotten again until she pops ups somewhere else and you get that feel good in your innards, hoping this time she’ll go better with whatever she’s in.