Written by: Ellen Rapoport
Starring: Nasim Pedrad, Anna Camp, Lamorne Morris, Sarah Burns, Jessica Chaffin
Rating: [1.5/5]
It takes hard work to maintain a relationship like being honest and working through the struggles life eventually brings to your doorstep. The mature way to handle it would entail having an adult conversation or you can stalk them and try to delete a nasty email you sent to them. The only two real options evidently and I’m sure you can guess which option gets utilized in the unfortunately inadequate Desperados.
With no real dating or career success in busy Los Angeles, Wesley (Nasim Pedrad) has become desperate to live the lifestyle she has always dreamed of, which includes a dreamy husband and kids. After a bad blind date with Sean (Lamorne Morris), she accidentally bumps into Jared (Robbie Amell). After they hit it off, she believes he ghosted her and drunkenly sends an expletive-laden email only to find out he was in a coma for those days and really likes her. Now, she must go down to the resort he was staying at in Mexico to delete the email before he sees it.
Adam Sandler has gotten away with studios financing vacations for him and his friends disguised as movies and Desperados proves that other actors can get away with it as well. That can be the only positive takeaway from this movie because it forgot to be anything else. Not only does it present an absurdly ridiculous plot, but it actually wants the audience to care for this journey this group of women are about to venture onto. This comes down to the screenplay and how it presents such artificial characters that cannot fully fulfill the overall positive message it wants to tell about relationships and timelines.
The film opens with Wesley at a job interview to be a guidance counselor at a Catholic school, where she either did not do her homework or does not fully understand what kind of institution she would be working for. It picks up towards the end of the interview where the presiding nun mentions the interview has gone well even with the lack of experience Wesley possesses. Then a question about sex comes up where Wesley states what she would tell the average girl and does not know telling a nun she will encourage her students to masturbate would not work well. From this moment, it’s made clear that perhaps she has not landed a job because of her own doing rather than the unlucky circumstances life has provided. She then hears from an ex-partner, who’s getting married which further drives her down into a deep hole. Wesley has reached the point where meeting Jared would fulfill all of her needs but in the early parts of the relationship, it’s made clear exactly what type of romp this wants to be.
Unfortunately, for Desperados, a film labeled as a comedy, everything it tries lands like a complete fart in the wind. At no moment did this film even cause a minor chuckle because the hijinx occurring was just sad to watch. Seeing the desperate measures after a while just caused a shaking of the head for a majority of the film-watching experience. As Wesley and her friends head down to Mexico, where Jared was staying prior to his injury, they book a room at the same resort hoping to get into his room and erase the email from his laptop. When they arrive at said resort, things go wrong for the characters narratively as well as any hope of this movie delivering on its genre promise.
A weird pedophilia joke keeps running through the story where a kid keeps running into Wesley in compromising situations, which leads his mother to believe she’s a pervert going after her child. The situations would be easy to explain if Wesley had any real sense to her, but no, she keeps getting into these situations through pure incompetence. At no point were any of these instances funny and after a while, I began to side with the mother because Wesley just cannot get anything right. She also runs into Sean, with whom she had a bad blind date with and shenanigans occur there. It feels like a spoiler to say this, but you probably should not watch this movie anyway. There comes a point in the movie where she’s out in the water near the dolphins. Wesley gets excited to see them so close and one jumps on her to hump her and then hits her face with its penis. Yes, you read that correctly. That’s the type of humor Desperados utilizes and none of it works.
The only saving grace of Desperados is the message it holds about not being beholden to the standards of those around you. This occurs frequently with social media where everyone has these advances in life, which they post for all of their friends and family to see. This makes others who have not reached that level feel inferior but there’s no real timeline in life. Just because someone in the same age group got married does not indicate success in life. It remains a relative experience, which gets expressed in this movie next to all of the horrendous nonsense comedy it attempts. No need to seek this one out unless you want to see what a nice Mexican resort looks like.
Films with Josh 
