'The Wrong Missy' should make you question your life decisions

Netflix

A laugh riot if your favorite word is “pubes,” “The Wrong Missy” at last bullies the endless charms of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” into the toilet water of the horrifying Sandra Bullock vehicle “All About Steve.” Add “leading man” David Spade looking as if he was cast via blackmail and a script scribbled on the in-flight liquor receipt on the way to shooting in Hawaii, and any Netflix subscriber has the chance to answer, “Am I really desperate enough during quarantine to watch this? And how much worse am I willing to feel?”

On the one hand, “The Wrong Missy” seems rather benign. Unlike the main character in most of Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison titles (“Blended,” “Just Go With It,” “Jack and Jill”), Tim (Spade), a banking-industry sales vice president whose personal life involves asking the GrubHub delivery person to hang out and getting turned down, is not a fountain of insults for every person he meets. But Tim comes from a long line of Sandler-adjacent creations requiring the male lead to possess virtually no appealing characteristics at all. While the Happy Madison brand has long been (accurately) savaged for representing cruelty and laziness in equal measure, “The Wrong Missy” crystallizes the comedy outfit as a key fluffer for mediocre, middle-aged white men without empathy, the last people that studios should be spending millions to placate and entertain.

I mean: There’s a point when Missy (Lauren Lapkus of “Crashing”) -- who Tim accidentally text-invites on a work trip to Hawaii instead of the Missy (Molly Sims) who he made out with in an airport janitor’s closet and doesn’t carry a massive knife named Sheila in her purse -- attempts to catch up to a boat departing a dock. She falls into the water and doesn’t surface, and Tim just wants the boat to drive away. This comes after a scene when Tim can’t even convincingly tell Missy he doesn’t want her to die while trying to persuade her not to dive off of a cliff. After she sustains injuries that would kill Dwayne Johnson as well as most rhinos, Tim’s best friend Nate (Nick Swardson) screams, “She’s alive! Dammit!” Happy Madison movies can only exist in worlds in which the main dude perceives himself as superior … while also wanting to have it both ways and eventually pander toward the person or group of people who spent the rest of the movie as the source of mockery.

To suggest that the movie is trying to expose closed-mindedness is like calling “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” progressive. Missy is conceived as being extremely unstable for the sake of removing all concern for her as a person, and -- spoiler alert, blehhh -- that “The Wrong Missy” leads to Tim falling for her for being appealingly bizarre removes every shred of logic that wasn’t already devastated by the idea that this woman in her mid-30s has latched onto a guy in his mid-50s for no reason beyond severe, severe loneliness. Poor Sarah Chalke (“Scrubs”) plays Tim’s ex-fiance, who of course still has feelings for him and, sigh, leaves an almost-threesome with Tim and Missy after repeatedly, accidentally getting smacked in the face.

Clearly buying the premise requires ingesting expired prescription medication. Any remotely functioning human who meets the person of their dreams and a total nightmare with the same name would double-check 5,000 times that they were texting the right person before sending “Hi,” much less a travel invite. And there is certainly a place for undemanding comedy as a time-passer in between binging weightier material or coping with the modern world. But no amount of comic ability from Lapkus can redeem “The Wrong Missy,” which also suggests that Tim would be more than fine to accept a promotion he does not deserve and insists on calling Tim’s chief rival The Barracuda simply because she’s a successful, ambitious woman.

I’ll never understand how Sandler, who supposedly is a great guy and anything but untalented (“Uncut Gems” is now on Netflix too, BTW), can live with making a career of laugh-starved comedies that unintentionally make you root for the main character to fail miserably. Or who would think a film like this is more than a free trip for a star whose default setting is “I’m pompous and dull, but look at this insane character I’m playing off of.” “Get her the fuck off me,” Tim says after surviving a shark attack and Missy telling him she thought she lost him. If escapism means seeing this jerk take no responsibility, suffer no consequences and choose a partner based solely on what she can do for him, we’re more than overdue for an escape from that.

D

Order “Zack Morris Lied 329 Times! Reassessing every ridiculous episode of ‘Saved by the Bell’ … with stats” (featuring interviews with 22 cast members, plus the co-founder of Saved by the Max and the creator of “Zack Morris is Trash”)