Four childhood friends who never hang out decide to escape the drudgery of their daily lives by going to a spa resort. But one friend, Mel (Isla Fisher), is desperate to have a wilder weekend than they expected. Chaos ensues.
Filmmaking team Jon Lucas and Scott Moore made their name by writing the original screenplay for 2009’s The Hangover, in which three friends and their weird mate get blackout drunk on a stag do. That film was the archetype, the bedrock text, the Dead Sea Scroll of early 2000s-2010s ‘kerrazzzy party’ movies. Since then, Lucas and Moore have made a career out of leaning into this mould, producing variations on that raunchily hedonistic theme: from 21 & Over (three friends get blackout drunk on a 21st birthday) to Bad Moms (three mothers get blackout drunk because they’re stressed) and A Bad Moms Christmas (three mothers get blackout drunk, but at Christmas).
Spa Weekend is the latest innovation on that highly original template. The set-up for this alleged comedy is as perfunctory as they come: three childhood friends in their forties — lawyer and single mum Jane (Leslie Mann), hard-working Sophie (Anna Faris), and hothead divorcee Coco (Michelle Buteau) — lament the fact that they never hang out anymore. On a whim, they book a spa weekend at a luxury resort, owned by a woman with a mystifying English-ish accent. By accident, they also invite their estranged pal, Aussie wildcard Mel (Isla Fisher), who sends the weekend into catastrophic chaos.
The cast find pockets of charisma amid the terribly written script.
It’s hard to know what’s more offensive about this film. For one thing, it boasts among the most reductive ideas possible of what it thinks women want: male strippers, mud baths, meditation, and dry humping. The hunky love interest, Adam Demos’ yoga instructor Kai, seems like a 1990s conception of what straight women want out of a man, with his cheese-grater abs and slow-motion blond tips; even Peter Andre would think it was old-fashioned.
Far more unpleasant is the presence of Isla Fisher’s Mel, who falls into the Zach-Galifianakis-in-The-Hangover mould, the weirdo outsider who the others can’t stand. But where Galifianakis’ Alan was at least charmingly clueless, Mel is genuinely hateful, an obnoxious presence with an almost Trumpian lack of self-awareness, whose only purpose is destruction and harm. The antics she gets up to — she joyrides a golf buggy! She lets goats loose on the resort! She is loud in a meditation class! — are hopelessly contrived and unfunny, amounting to genuinely toxic behaviour, which is summarily forgiven by her pals.
The cast are all talented comedic actors who at least find pockets of charisma amid the terribly written script, and having an all-female cast in a theatrically released major studio comedy is no small feat. Women should be allowed to be just as disgusting and obnoxious as men in our comedies. But maybe let’s get someone other than these two blokes writing and directing it next time.
This Hangover facsimile — ‘Eat, Pray, Shag’, if you like — is an insult to the female audience it is targeting. Even the hen do crowds will be unimpressed.
