The Wrong Missy opens with Tim (David Spade) fleeing a blind date through a bathroom window, his ankle dislocated—the kind of image that announces exactly what kind of film Tyler Spindel has made. Directed by Spindel and produced by Happy Madison Productions, the film is a farcical mess. It is occasionally something more. The premise is simple: Tim, a recently single businessman, invites the wrong woman to his corporate retreat in Hawaii, and the “wrong” Missy (Lauren Lapkus) is everything the polished Melissa isn’t—unpredictable, reckless, chronically unfiltered.

Announced in January 2019 with Spade attached to star, The Wrong Missy was always destined to be a vehicle for his particular brand of detached bemusement. Where other romcoms might rely on quirky charm, this one leans hard into absurdity. Missy’s antics—tranquilizing Tim on the plane, waking him from sedation with her hands already busy, hypnotizing his boss to win his favor at the retreat—are so over-the-top that they occasionally land as darkly funny rather than merely crass, which is not nothing. The film’s script, written by Chris Pappas and Kevin Barnett, leans heavily on slapstick and crude humor, but some set pieces—Missy riding Tim while he’s barely conscious, Tim later attempting a walking handstand in the dining room—work against all reasonable expectations.

Lapkus is the film’s standout, and the performance repays closer attention than the material seems to deserve. She plays Missy not as a one-note wild card but as someone whose recklessness has a logic: every intrusion—the tranquilizers, the hypnosis, the increasingly unhinged social behavior at the retreat—functions as a kind of aggressive sincerity, a person incapable of performing composure. When the plot eventually reveals that Missy’s invitation was a mistake and she quietly disappears from Hawaii, Lapkus makes the exit register as something genuinely sad. The film barely earns that beat structurally, but she sells it anyway. Spade plays it straight, which works in theory but feels flat alongside her. The chemistry between them is uneven, but when it clicks—in the moments where Tim’s deadpan reserve starts to crack—the film briefly finds its footing before losing it again.

The pacing is erratic. Long stretches of setup give way to abrupt payoffs, and the corporate retreat setting offers some visual variety—lush Hawaiian landscapes contrasting with sterile hotel interiors—but Spindel’s direction lacks any real flair. The film’s biggest misstep is its tonal inconsistency: it wants to be both a raunchy comedy and a heartfelt romance, and it cannot settle on either. The romantic beats feel rushed, particularly Tim’s sudden realization that he prefers Missy’s chaos over Melissa’s idea of perfection.

The scene where Tim loses his job after removing the hypnotic spell on his boss is meant to read as a grand gesture of honesty. It doesn’t quite. The supporting cast—Nick Swardson as Tim’s friend Nate, Geoff Pierson as CEO Jack Winstone—are underutilized, and the subplot involving the other Melissa feels tacked on.

Not without charm. The finale, where Tim tricks Missy into a date by playing the same game she once played on him—only for her to meet Vanilla Ice at the bar—is both hilarious and oddly sweet. Tim’s apology speech, in which he admits he used to want someone exactly like himself but now realizes he doesn’t, is as economical a romantic declaration as the genre allows. It works.

Upon its release on Netflix in May 2020, The Wrong Missy received mostly negative reviews from critics, landing well below the fresh threshold on the Tomatometer while IMDb users proved slightly more forgiving. Reception was overshadowed by the pandemic, which limited its cultural footprint. In the years since, a cult following has formed—fans of raunchy comedies, largely, and those who appreciate what Lapkus does with limited material.

The film’s production history is as chaotic as its plot: Happy Madison Productions, the outfit known for churning out Adam Sandler vehicles, handed Spindel this feature and the result is precisely what you’d expect—competent but uninspired behind the camera, with all the real energy generated by the performances rather than the direction. The casting of Lapkus proved to be the film’s one genuinely inspired decision, even if the script didn’t always know what to do with her.

Mistaken identity and self-discovery recur throughout the film as thematic concerns, but they are routinely drowned out by the loud, crass humor the script reaches for whenever it loses confidence in its quieter instincts. The corporate retreat setting could have been a rich backdrop for workplace satire. It isn’t. Instead we get a series of disjointed set pieces that feel more like sketches than parts of any cohesive narrative, strung together more by comic momentum than by plot logic—and that momentum is almost entirely Lapkus’s to generate and sustain.

The Wrong Missy did not leave a lasting mark on the romcom genre. What staying power it has comes down to Lapkus’s specificity—not just the energy she brings but the emotional detail: the way she plays Missy’s departure from Hawaii, the quality of her hurt when she discovers the truth, the odd sweetness she gives what is written as a pure cartoon character. Flawed, frequently graceless, and funnier than it deserves to be, the film’s best moments are hers. That’s both its luck and its limitation.