Desperados Parent Guide

Wesley (Nasim Pedrad) is struggling to get her life together. She’s unlucky in love, broke, and unable to find a job after finishing grad school. Just as she’s given up hope, she meets Jared (Robbie Amell), who seems like the perfect guy. When he doesn’t contact her for five days, Wesley assumes she’s been ghosted and writes him an angry email, only to find out he’s actually been in a coma in Mexico. Desperate to delete the email before he reads it, Wesley heads to Mexico with her best friends, Brooke (Anna Camp) and Kaylie (Sarah Burns), to find Jared’s laptop before he gets released from the hospital.

I want to start off by congratulating Netflix on their huge achievement of creating a wormhole device that turns 105 minutes into four hours. They should sell that technology to NASA and get their money’s worth. At one point during the runtime, I thought the story was wrapping up and I felt like I’d been watching for a while, so I checked how much time was left. I was less than halfway through. That was the moment I realized that I needed to hunker down for the long haul. I kissed my sweet baby goodbye and settled in. An eternity later, I emerged from my bedroom, slightly dehydrated, hungry, and with a headache, realizing it was now time to make dinner, even though I had started watching right after lunch. This film stole my entire day from me, and yet it claims to only be 105 minutes long. I’m not claiming witchcraft, but I’m also not not claiming witchcraft.

Aside from being an eternity long, the writers of this movie also forgot that they were making a comedy and failed to add any jokes. Cringy secondhand embarrassment is hard to get right as humor, and this production gets it very wrong. I did not laugh or even crack a smile the whole time. I did have to look away and breathe deeply a few times when it got too mortifying to even witness. Cringe is almost never funny. When not trying to kill the audience with squirmingly awkward moments, the writers also attempt to include humor through profanity and sexual innuendo. This, too, does not work. It’s possible to be crass and funny, but Desperados falls fully into the “gross” category. Call me a prude but I just don’t think tween boys should be used for pedophile jokes and sexual innuendo.

The only somewhat redeeming part of this dumpster fire is the last 15 or so minutes. Brooke and Kaylie have an honest and real discussion about the pain of infertility, which seems very out of place compared to the rest of the story but is really well done. And it is only in these last few minutes that the overall message of the film becomes clear: boyfriends come and go but best friends will always be there for you. I think that’s actually a sweet message, especially in a rom-com, but it comes so late in the game that it misses out on having any real impact. There are glimmers of an actually great movie in here somewhere. The general premise has potential, the cast is talented, and the message is timely and fresh for the genre, but the bad writing ruins any hope Desperados could have had.