Review: First Date Lazily Pays Homage to the Tropes of the ’80s Teen Comedy

The breezy setup of writer-directors Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s First Date recalls the ’80s teen comedies that the film clearly aspires to. Mike (Tyson Brown) pines for the girl next door, Kelsey (Shelby Duclos), but can’t seem to do anything about it other than awkwardly stare at her while riding by on his bike, especially given that local meathead Chet (Brandon Kraus) also has his eyes on her. Yet when Mike finally works up the nerve to give Kelsey a call and ask her on a date, egged on by his boisterous best friend, Brett (Josh Fesler), she surprisingly agrees. Now all that Mike has to do is find some wheels (his parents have taken the family car out for the night) in time to pick her up later that evening.

The shadow of Paul Brickman’s Risky Business looms large over many a subsequent teen romp and Crosby and Knapp glom on to the teen-thrust-into-dangerous-adventures-beyond-their-age conceit early and often. Once Mike ends up purchasing a ramshackle ‘65 Chrysler out of the garage of a shady seller named Dennis (Scott E. Noble), only to almost immediately find a hidden stash of drugs and stolen merchandise inside it, we’re already attuned to the narrative trajectory that First Date will take. From here, a rogues’ gallery of drug dealers, corrupt cops, and other wacky ne’er-do-wells are thrown in Mike’s path, creating a series of arbitrary obstacles for him to navigate through in order to get home in time for the big night.

While such a scattershot formula has been used to great comedic effect in the decades since Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodson gyrated about his house in his tighty-whities, it helps to have a charismatic actor to center the increasingly out-of-control situations. Unfortunately, Mike is the kind of character whose extreme meekness is supposed to mask an inner sensitivity but really just borders on the catatonic, with Brown more or less shuffling through each scene with a passivity that makes it hard to sympathize with the dilemmas that Mike often brings on himself. As a result, it’s up to the zany supporting cast to inject the film with some life—a difficult task when they’re saddled with a script full of confusingly aimless plot turns, clunky one-liners, and meaningless references to the nostalgia of decades past (8-track players and VHS tapes of Titanic enter the fray because old tech is, apparently, inherently funny).

First Date’s biggest disappointment, though, is that out of all this madness, the one character who seems interesting in any sort of unconventional kind of way is effectively sidelined. Introduced as a girl who’s eager to physically fight and outwit the dumb losers who chase after her (in her first scene, she’s shown practicing her kickboxing moves on a punching bag before intellectually humiliating Chet in front of his group of friends), Kelsey quickly spends the majority of the runtime just waiting around for Mike, a guy who’s given no discernible qualities that might be appealing to an ostensibly strong-minded person like herself.

In a seemingly compensatory move, the film’s hasty climax finally allows Kelsey to get in on the action and kick some drug-dealer ass of her own (while Mike, of course, stands by and does nothing). But as the filmmakers barely explore the layers of her identity up to this point, the moment ultimately scans as an empty gesture, and mostly serves to further position her as an objectified dream girl. Instead of shifting equal focus between both parties in this first-date scenario, Crosby and Knapp, playing right into the male-dominated tropes of ’80s comedies rather than subverting them, prioritize their unspeakably dull protagonist’s perspective.