by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $9.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Anna Faris, Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, Michelle Buteau
Intro:
… as enjoyable as sunburn.
Jon Lucas and Scott Moore are a one-hit wonder cinematic team. After the original Hangover, their transition from writers to writer/directors has seen them reheating the same meal even more than The Hangover’s own sequels. While they found success with the ‘Hangover at college’ 21 & Over and the Bad Moms duology, their standard mode of the one perpetual screw-up in a friend group putting everyone else through a surreal endurance course and them all coming out the other side as better people and friends… well, it’s been tired for a while now. This reached a serious low point in 2019 with Jexi, which took three things that shouldn’t be in any movie to begin with (Adam DeVine in a lead role, screen media that hates screens, and emotionally abusing men strictly for the laughs) and tossed them together to make their most rotten concoction yet.
Their latest, Spa Weekend, may not reach those same depths of raw aggravation… but it might be an indicator that even these two are getting tired of their one plot set-up.
Going full vacation-core with four friends on the titular getaway, the beautiful shots of Queensland coastline can be difficult to appreciate or even see all that clearly through all the lampshading. Not only are Lucas/Moore still going about business as usual, with Isla Fisher’s Mel as the Alan Garner of the piece, they are actively pointing out the formula in the dialogue; multiple times, Jane (Leslie Mann), Sophie (Anna Faris), and Coco (Michelle Buteau) will refer to Mel as the one friend they do not like, as if their remarkable lack of chemistry and Mel just stampeding through every scene she’s in didn’t already make that clear as a broken crystal.
The plot is as lightweight as the title makes it sound, and as an extension of something like Bad Moms, there’s a germ of an idea here about the stresses in de-stressing from the everyday grind. But even with the basic premise, the film doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. It’s hard to see Mel’s disruptions as being actually disruptive when everyone else stays sceptical about the entire idea of holistic wellness offered by the spa.
In effect, the film involves watching people experience something well out of the means for most audiences, and even the people doing it don’t seem all that invested in it. Vacation-core, where a film production ostensibly exists mainly for the lush destination shoot, can usually skate by on evoking some form of vicarious pleasure in the scenario. But if the characters don’t seem to care, why should we?
But hey, it’s not meant to be taken seriously; it’s just a shame then that the humour isn’t great either. It’s built to stand solely on the main cast’s personalities and chemistry, usually sticking to wacky simile “I/You/We look like ____” riffing that has long since been played-out. Individually, the actors are in roles that suit; Leslie Mann as the studious responsible one, Anna Faris as the doofy blonde, Isla Fisher as chaotic shrill incarnate, and Michelle Buteau… okay, they got three out of four. But put together, the dynamics, both as comedic presences in a story and just as people you could see being actual friends, just lounge rather than pull the audience in. They don’t do a great deal to elevate the quipping, both written and improvised, to the point where the funniest moment comes when yoga teacher Kai, played by Adam Demos, wonders in total sincerity “How do you know that reference?” when Jane namedrops Crocodile Dundee. Of all the things in this film to be confused by, an American mentioning the one Australian movie every American of their generation has heard of doesn’t rank particularly high.
Spa Weekend is as enjoyable as sunburn. With a threadbare and formulaic premise, it still manages to miss the point in filming a story this simple, where even the cast are struggling to make the connective tissue between mud baths and massages seem interesting. It’s uninvolving, it’s loud in less-than-appealing ways, any interpersonal meat is an afterthought, and it’s so openly lazy with its writing that it’s simply disrespectful.
