A stoner movie has to walk a careful line, because someone else’s drug trip is rarely entertaining. Even “classics” of the genre can have this problem. To address this challenge in concept, writer-director Dylan Meyer’s The Wrong Girls deploys its leads: Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat. If novelty adds to a film, seeing these two in a Pineapple Express-style narrative is a draw. But a film cannot thrive on novelty or even concept alone; it needs execution too, which is sorely lacking here.
Short on rent and future prospects, roommates Frankie (Stewart) and Molly (Shawkat) lack a sense of urgency about their circumstances. That is until a mix-up with shadowy goons—thanks to the presence of a lookalike Stewart—puts a new drug in their hands, and a target on their backs. The pair is still high as hell, but there’s now a push to figure stuff out, particularly after the experimental substance gives them telekinetic powers. A different version of The Wrong Girls could make a real stoner meal from that setup; Meyer, instead, drags out every scene and seems to only accidentally land on a couple of humorous, new ideas. Casting Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani as talking cats is about as good as it gets. The trip starts small, stays dull, and bumbles on and on (and on) for what feels like forever.
We’re left then with only an endless string of vignettes that nominally move the plot forward. Sure, some aimless drifting is expected, but with that pace, the true death knell of The Wrong Girls emerges: it’s just not funny at all. There are talented comedic actors here, and it is fun to imagine a legit movie star like Stewart in a dingy stoner movie, but everything in Meyer’s film is somehow both exhausting and lazy. Maybe if I had been high while watching it, I’d have more patience. In truth, I probably would have just fallen asleep.
