The Wrong Missy review – Happy Madison makes everyone unhappy again

By Jonathon Wilson
Published: May 13, 2020 (Last updated: February 1, 2023)
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The Wrong Missy (Netflix) review - Happy Madison makes everyone unhappy again
1.5

Summary

The Wrong Missy accomplishes 2020’s first great cinematic feat in ensuring David Spade isn’t the most annoying part of a movie — but that’s the best that can be said about it.

It’s a weird year for movies, obviously, but in Tyler Spindel’s new Netflix Original cringe-comedy The Wrong Missy, Lauren Lapkus pulls off what might be 2020’s most impressive cinematic feat: She’s somehow more annoying than David Spade.

Spade has worked with Spindel before, and this being a Happy Madison production it’s no surprise to see him and several of producer Adam Sandler’s comedy chums here. These things are always stocked with Sandler’s mates and relatives since no right-minded agent would present a client with a script as diabolical as the one Chris Pappas and Kevin Barnett have provided here, except apparently whoever mismanages Lapkus’s career.

Any novelty in a woman being given the inappropriate innuendo duties in a Sandler sausage fest hardly seems worth the effort of sitting through The Wrong Missy. Spade plays Tim Morris, who wants to invite the Melissa (Molly Sims) he met at the airport to his company’s corporate retreat in Hawaii, but ends up accidentally inviting the Melissa (Lapkus) he had a terrible blind date with instead. It’s an easy mistake to make, I guess, though arguably not a worse one than sitting down to watch this movie in the first place.

What follows is a tedious romantic cringe-comedy. Of course, expect to see various Happy Madison stalwarts such as Rob Schneider, Nick Swardson and Sandler’s wife Jackie in attendance, as well as WWE superstar Roman Reigns, for some reason. His presence might have been welcome, since there are too few instances of people being deservedly body-slammed in The Wrong Missy, but it was perhaps too much to expect him to lift a movie that can’t even sustain the weight of its own thoughtless rom-com cliché.

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