Netflix’s mid-pandemic comedy The Wrong Missy arrives with modest ambitions and a recognizable pedigree: director Tyler Spindel and star David Spade both emerged from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production machine, and the film wears that lineage openly — a tropical resort setting, a fish-out-of-water scenario, and the droll, ironic persona Spade has been refining since the 1990s. What the film does not advertise, and what saves it from formulaic irrelevance, is Lauren Lapkus.

The premise is economy itself: Tim Morris, a mid-level corporate executive, briefly meets his dream girl at an airport — poised, warm, named Missy — and spends weeks texting her before impulsively inviting her to his company’s retreat in Hawaii. He discovers at the airport, too late, that he has been messaging the wrong Missy: the chaotic, unfiltered blind date from months earlier that he had tried to forget. Lapkus plays this Missy as a force of nature — physically committed, tonally unpredictable, and somehow genuinely tender beneath the comic extremity. Where the script asks for an embarrassment machine, she finds a person.

Spindel’s direction is serviceable without being distinctive. He has a workman’s grasp of comedy timing and makes sensible use of the Hawaiian resort locations, but the visual grammar is anonymous — the camera is where it needs to be, never where it wants to be. The screenplay by Chris Pappas and Kevin Barnett follows the romantic comedy playbook with minimal deviation: escalating misadventure, third-act confession, redemptive resolution. There are no structural surprises. Within the formula, however, there are moments — Lapkus in a water-skiing sequence, a dinner scene that veers into surrealism — where the film achieves a genuine anarchic freedom that the premise rarely earns.

The supporting cast is deployed efficiently: Nick Swardson provides the requisite best-friend absurdism, Candice Bergen brings real comic dignity to the corporate boss role, and Sarah Chalke appears briefly as the idealized Missy, her brevity underscoring by contrast everything Lapkus has been doing all along — building a character rather than a punchline. As a streaming comedy, The Wrong Missy fulfills its contract: cheerful, intermittently very funny, and driven entirely by one performance the material barely deserves.