103 min | R | August 27, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
A buttoned-up couple meets a feral one on a Mexico vacation and makes the mistake of trading numbers. Months later the wild pair crashes the wedding, uninvited and undeterred. Some friendships you escape. This one books a flight.
Marcus and Emily are a careful couple on a Mexico getaway when their resort suite floods. Ron and Kyla, a louder and looser pair, take them in and proceed to dismantle every boundary the weekend has. The two couples part ways. Months later Ron and Kyla turn up uninvited at Marcus and Emily’s wedding to wreck the careful life Marcus has built. The film is about a control freak forced to surrender control to people he cannot stand and cannot shake.
Lil Rel Howery plays Marcus as a man whose anxiety runs his face before it runs his mouth. He spends most of the film mid-flinch, and Howery sells the slow-burn panic better than any of the gross-out gags around him. John Cena plays Ron with an openness that disarms the character’s menace. Cena commits to Ron’s sincerity without winking at the camera, and that earnestness does more work than his size. Yvonne Orji plays Emily with a warmth that grounds the chaos, and Meredith Hagner plays Kyla as a woman whose oversharing hides something sadder underneath.
Clay Tarver directs from a script he shares with Tim Mullen, Tom Mullen, Jonathan Goldstein, and John Francis Daley. The Mexico opening is shot in flat resort sunlight that the wedding-weekend scenes never recover, and the visual flatness drains the comedy of momentum once the location changes. Tarver stages the set pieces in wide static shots that let the actors play but rarely build a gag through editing. The structure is a string of escalating embarrassments with no engine connecting them. The film coasts on its cast because the craft gives it nothing else to ride.
This is a studio comedy that found two performers worth more than its premise. The Cena and Howery pairing generates real friction, and the movie keeps returning to it because nothing else in the script holds. The plot mechanics are visible from the first reel, and every complication lands exactly where you expect. The actors are having more fun than the writing earns, and you watch them instead of the movie.