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There's Something Wrong with The Wrong Girls

It’s weird that a mediocre stoner comedy somehow hit on a brilliant idea for a superhero comic that seemingly none have tried yet. Heroes come into their powers via so many routes -alien DNA, spider bite, radioactive waste; why couldn’t they just come from taking a bad drug?
I suppose the Comics Code Authority would never allow that in a medium that is predominantly all-ages in output, but The Wrong Girls doesn’t have to worry about that. The directorial debut of screenwriter Dylan Meyer, it is the second effort this year after Pizza Movie to revive the stoner comedy -though while Pizza Movie took its stylistic cues from a modern kind of rapid-fire absurdist internet humour, The Wrong Girls is more in the traditional vein of something that Cheech and Chong might have made: a pair of stoners caught up in a ridiculous premise where their intoxication factors more into the humour than the trip itself. This approach means that more of the film is carried on the back of the personalities getting high and the performance of said inebriation, which can be a challenge -especially so if the ludicrous context this is set against isn’t actually exploited all that much, as is unfortunately the case here.
Meyer casts her own wife Kristen Stewart alongside Alia Shawkat as a pair of codependent California layabouts, Frankie and Molly. They live in a shoddy apartment where they struggle to make rent off of their meagre day jobs and spend most of their time at home getting high. Frankie was once a Stanford alum though she failed to graduate and is loaded with debt while Molly aspires to be a chef but lacks the resources to make her dream happen. While out at a concert, Frankie runs into an ex dating a doppelganger of her and a mix-up ensues wherein she is given a mysterious briefcase. When she and Molly open it the next day they uncover a stash of experimental drugs and become the targets of dangerous criminal agents. Further upon trying the substance, they gain telekinetic abilities that make for a chaotic combination with their baked minds.
Stewart and Shawkat have good chemistry which is important for a movie that ultimately hinges on their friendship. It is thrown through the usual formula though which is quite dim and uninteresting -the pair’s obligatory break-up especially tedious here in a context where they find themselves communicating telepathically for stretches of the runtime. There is some tension laid out to justify it but it still feels like an empty and time-consuming conflict in a movie that is at a loss for ideas after about the midway point. In fact it is remarkable how many missed opportunities the movie skates by in its latter half for the powers that Frankie and Molly find themselves with, preferring to instead focus on the manufactured drama between them, the dull European smuggler villains chasing them, and their two snarky cats, whose minds they can communicate with now, voiced by Kumail Nanjiani and –who else- Seth Rogen.
There are some good jokes involving these characters, and some good jokes in the film overall. Often they involve Frankie and Molly in on something together, whether it be their mind discussions or, in the one visualization of their drugged-up delusions, performing an elaborate dance together. But more of the humour tends to be rather dull or stereotypical to stoner films or other types of 'dumb' comedies. Kate McKinnon plays a scientist with a pronounced German accent purely because she thinks it’s funny.  The film tries to mine more humour out of the girls' overzealous reactions to their powers rather than the powers themselves -for a film with a supernatural component it doesn't much go to that well for visual and circumstantial comedy, preferring a tone that is pretty low-key and ordinary; which would be less of an issue if there was much cleverness or style behind it. And some of the talking animal gags could have been left over from the tepid talking animal movies of the early 2000s -the only difference is now they are making weed references.
What sucks about a lot of the shallowness in this is that the movie stands on some good legs, and not just in the earlier alluded uniqueness of its premise. The Wrong Girls is very much a stoner comedy of the modern moment, in that its heroines are inextricable from the economic and political environment of the post-COVID recession-curious 2020s. Frankie and Molly have been let down by the system, both capable and qualified for greater work than they are burdened with, but kept out of it. The general miseries and mental health effects of their environment is implicitly a big reason for their co-dependence, especially on Frankie's side as she is the more resentful of where she is. And it is not down to the drug-use, as we see when the pair are thrust into a party of yuppie Stanford alums, hosted by an arrogant Tony Hale. There really isn't much besides class and the privileges that affords separating them from Frankie. And it is of course true of many an educated millennial in this economic environment -you can understand perfectly the antipathy that has affected Frankie with, and why she would rather distract herself in her cannabis vice. But the allusion to these themes doesn't amount to a lot, especially by the movie's end where the girls are given a platform with government-associated actors (represented by Geena Davis in an all too brief cameo) -the resolution of their financial issues is as meagre as their personal ones.
There are some good jokes and fun moments in The Wrong Ones. And Stewart especially seems to enjoy the opportunity to play this kind of comedy (an opportunity she almost certainly wouldn't be afforded if her wife hadn't written it for her). The chaos of two stoners becoming telepaths, and by extent proto-superheroes, does come with some nifty shenanigans. But in execution, the story is too dim and conventional for that premise, it fails to take advantage of its own heightened implications, and leaves a lot of the humour and social commentary lacking. I wouldn't say that it is equivalent to a bad trip, but it is perhaps that hazy and empty feeling in the aftermath as you are sobering up from one.

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