‘The Wrong Girls’ is Proudly Not Much of Anything

Dylan Meyer’s debut feature, “The Wrong Girls,” is a shambling, amiable and old-fashioned movie. David Mirkin’s “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” (1997) and Mike Judge’s “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America” (1996) are cited as inspirations, but the picture has roots that run deeper. Buddies of limited intelligence, flippant substance abuse, international intrigue, mistaken identities and talking animals? Cheech and Chong, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope, just to name a few, signed off on similar ventures. Ms. Meyer is working in a grand tradition: The sloppy comedy. “The Wrong Girls” drapes silly situations on a blatantly flimsy framework. Forget the likes of Buster Keaton, Ernst Lubitsch or Jacques Tati, directors for whom a film was a unified totality. Ms. Meyer is closer kin to the likes of Norman Z. McLeod, Eddie Sutherland and early Woody Allen — that is to say, arbiters of set pieces. Structure and coherence are less important than jokes.Those directors depended on the skills of the actors on hand and so, too, does Ms. Meyer. Audiences may not think of Kristen Stewart as a go-to actress for comedy, but here she proves a dab hand at playing dumb and stoned, as does Alia Shawkat, whose talents were honed on the Fox and later Netflix series, “Arrested Development.” Ms. Shawkat’s former co-star, Tony Hale, has been roped in to play a wealthy benefactor with an odd hankering for pureed foods. Kate McKinnon, late of “Saturday Night Live,” walks away with the movie as a scientist with a hilariously impenetrable European accent.‘The Wrong Girls’. NeonKristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are Frankie and Molly, friends and roommates who are perpetually behind on the rent. Frankie scratches by as a delivery person after having squandered a full-ride to Stanford University. Molly has an online job as a bookkeeper, as well as a boyfriend with gainful employment, Josh (Zack Fox). Frankie isn’t fond of Josh, seeing him as a drag on her friendship with Molly. Still, he’s less complicated than a character known to us only as Not Metal Head Dave (Lakeith Stanfield, droll and unflappable). Dave turns out to be a freelance assassin.But the plot, yes, the plot: Dave mistakes Frankie for an attaché to the Danish government, and provides her with a top-secret suitcase filled with vials of a mysterious glowing liquid. Throwing caution to the wind, as Frankie and Molly must, they each down an entire dose of the stuff only to discover that it provides them with telekinetic powers. Not only can they read each other’s minds, the ladies are now able to hear the thoughts of their cats, Dio (Seth Rogen) and GG (Kumail Nanjiani). Our heroines can also move objects at will, which comes in handy when dealing with a crisply attired sextet of Danish super spies. No, really.Give into the blissed-out hijinks supplied by Ms. Meyer, who in real life is married to her leading lady Ms. Stewart, and you’ll find yourself amused and sometimes laughing out loud. The biggest drawback is a squalling soundtrack by Ty Segall that often drowns out this or that throwaway line, particularly those doled out by Messrs. Rogen and Nanjiani. Then again, the asides they’re saddled with are uninspired being largely predicated on language better left unsaid in a family newspaper. Otherwise “The Wrong Girls” isn’t much of anything and proud of it. There are worse ways to spend 90 minutes.

‘The Wrong Girls’ is Proudly Not Much of Anything

‘The Wrong Girls’ is Proudly Not Much of Anything

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