‘Desperados’ (2020) Review

Desperados Synopsis: A panicked young woman, with her reluctant friends in tow, rushes to Mexico to try and delete a ranting email she sent to her new boyfriend.

Wesley Darya (Nasim Pedrad) is having difficulty getting her life together. She’s unemployed, broke, and single. While she shows promise, she tends to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, making her a somewhat… acquired taste for the people in her life. Her best friends, Kaylie and Brooke, have an insane amount of patience for self-absorbed Wesley, considering they’re going through their own life problems – Kaylie (Sarah Burns), who is struggling to get pregnant, and Brooke (Anna Camp), who is debating whether or not to end her marriage after her husband was caught having an affair.

After a slightly disastrous blind date with Sean (Lamorne Morris), Wesley meets Jared (Robbie Amell, who continues his streak of playing bland, pretty boys). Jared is everything Wesley wants in a man. He has a good job and a lovely apartment and is hot. The only problem is they have nothing in common, so Wesley changes her personality to become the perfect girlfriend.

After a month of dating, they finally sleep together… and then Jared goes MIA for nearly a week, sending Wesley into a tailspin of insecurity. A drunken evening with Brooke and Kaylie results in a hurtful, insulting email that Wesley sends to Jared, just as Jared calls to explain he was in an accident in Mexico and had been in a medically induced coma for the past week.

Mortified, Wesley plans to fly to Mexico to break into Jared’s hotel room to find his laptop and delete the email before Jared reads it. Because BFFs stick together, Brooke and Kaylie agree to accompany her. While in Mexico, Wesley runs into a few dilemmas in her attempt to break into Jared’s room, including bumping into Sean, who is in Cabo, to get himself together after the death of his wife. Eventually, Sean is roped into Wes’s crazy plan as well.

And it’s a crazy plan. It didn’t take long before I realized that Wesley was Crazy Pants. Crazy. I’ve seen plenty of movies where the woman or man attempts to change or hide the less savory traits of their personality, but there’s usually something redeeming about them. It was hard to find that in Wesley. She was instantly unlikeable.

I’m a big fan of Nasim Pedrad, but the only scenes she shined in were those she shared with Lamorne Morris. I already knew they had some fantastic chemistry due to watching their characters fall in love with New Girl. That chemistry still exists in Desperados, but you almost want to yell at Sean to run, run away! when we see him starting to fall for Wes.

Anna Camp and Sarah Burns are always a delight to watch, but the issue with Desperados is that it doesn’t seem to know what kind of movie it wants to be. After Brooke and Kaylie go off to do their own thing in Mexico, the movie shifts between their adventure with a New Age-y self-help guru played by Heather Graham and Sean and Wesley’s journey to delete the horrible email that started the whole thing. The movie began to feel very disjointed at this point. There was simply no cohesion whatsoever.

The jokes didn’t land. I like slapstick silliness if it’s done right, but I was baffled that someone really sat down and wrote a scene where Nasim Pedrad gets humped by a dolphin and then whacked in the face by the dolphin’s ding-dong. I’m not even lying.

I wish Desperados had dialed down Wesley’s crazy. Her attitude change toward the movie’s end felt unearned. Desperados could have been really fun and romantic had they focused more on Pedrad and Morris’s chemistry than pedophilia jokes and completely irrational decision-making. Or heck, do better and make the movie about the three women’s friendship and their struggles with one another. Either way, it needed to decide what kind of movie it wanted to be, and I don’t feel like it ever did.

Desperados is one to skip. Instead, watch Someone Great for a good movie about female friendships, or enjoy Pedrad and Morris’s chemistry in New Girl (starting with season 4) for some warm romance and humor.

Watched: 08/08/2020
Notable Song: God Only Knows by Sean Wiggins