The Wrong Missy Review: When First Impressions Go Wrong

It happens to everyone, texting the wrong person in your phone with someone meant for someone else. On The Wrong Missy, that concept is taken to an extreme when David Spade’s Tim Morris sends a text to his dream girl and instead ends up on a corporate retreat with a woman most might call a hot mess. 

This movie is enjoyable, and it’s definitely something I recommend watching if you want some lighter fare.

After sitting with it, there is a lot about this rom-com that can, and does, feel tired. While the premise feels fresh and relatable the characters come off as exagerated at first, but ultimately have a bit of real world humanity to them. 

The set up of someone getting the wrong first impression is not new and can be tricky to work with. There are notes that are vaguely reminiscent of Along Came Polly and All About Steve melded with outlandish plots and a dash of slapstick comedy. 

It feels largely superficial, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

The Wrong Missy is a superficial comedy because it needs to be. The entire premise is that Tim knows nothing about either of these women.

While the comedy lies in his mistake in texting the wrong Melissa, the two characters are essentially on an epic first date for the entire movie and just refusing to go past their initial impressions of each other.  

It would have been easy for this movie to rest on one-dimensional archetypes, and it does to an extent, but it has its moments where it strips those tropes away and the character’s humanity breaks through. 

Lauren Lapkus has a gift for slapstick comedy and she brings a fun and chaotic energy to every scene she’s in. It’s easy to see how Missy and Spade’s Tim wouldn’t get along at the first meeting because their energies clash constantly. 

It would be easy to have this go from hate-to-love at the drop of a hat, but The Wrong Missy does a solid job of drawing it out to a slower burn. It’s a more believable, and yet somewhat optimistic view of how this scenario would go down.

The audience follows Tim through most of this story, and as a result, a lot of it has a male gaze to it. Missy is an interesting character, but that interest has to unfold in relation to Tim and as a result I think she suffers. 

Personally, I am left wanting to see way more of Missy than Tim, and since the movie ends with a kiss; we never really get to see where this could have gone. 

Stray Thoughts:

• Really appreciated how the ending brought us back to reality by cutting out the music swell and having someone’s coffee order come over the loudspeaker. 
• Got to be honest, the shadow dancing totally killed Jess’s New Kids on the Block number. Of course, I also appreciate that they didn’t attempt to turn that into a high budget music interlude. It’s a corporate retreat, if Jess could sing that well she should be on American Idol. 
• Missy is the kind of character I want to be when I grow up: independent, self-assured, and not afraid of what people think of her. Being ballsy enough to set pass phrase to “hairy werewolf vagina with yellow teeth and a tongue” is just the tip of the iceberg.
• The threesome gone-wrong is one of the strongest scenes in the film, the fact that it had to start with the three of them brushing their teeth with cannabis toothpaste was an added layer of comedy. 
• Rob Schneider as Komante is the best comic relief. 

What did you think of The Wrong Missy? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The Wrong Missy is now available to stream on Netflix.

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