Spa Weekend: No Rest or Rejuvenation for Viewers of this Hackneyed Comedy
By Karen Gordon
Rating: C-
On paper, Spa Weekend looks like the ideal late-summer movie.
It has solid bona fides. Written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the writing team behind The Hangover and The Hangover 2, and boasting a dream lead cast, it has the raw material and the promise of being a new big, dumb comedy classic.
Alas, Spa Weekend could be subtitled: When Terrific Actors Get Bad Scripts. What is most notable about this film is how that dream cast of some of moviedom’s funniest women give life to a script that badly fails them, and us.
This dream cast includes actors who always deliver and are a joy to watch. These include Leslie Mann (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, This is 40), Anna Faris (The Scary Movie franchise, The House Bunny), and Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers). The newbie here is hotshot comedian Michelle Buteau (Survival of the Thickest), who proves her mettle as a comedy actress in an ensemble.
The four play characters who have been close friends since childhood, but whose career and family obligations have made it so that they’re rarely able to get together.
Jane (Mann) is a single mom and lawyer readying her post-surgery father to add to her already heavy obligations. Sophie (Faris) is a duty-bound, sweet, married mom and an executive assistant to a parking lot mogul who has the emotional maturity of an unbalanced five-year-old, whose insane demands spill over into Sophie’s private time.
Coco (Buteau) is a mom of two girls with anger issues going through a divorce, whose ex-husband Roger (Dominic Ona-Ariki) is dating an older woman, who is also a victim of some of Coco's anger. And Mel (Fisher) is an ostensibly successful travel blogger and loose enough canon that the others now view with caution.
Jane, Coco, and Sophie meet for a quick coffee and all agree they’re burnt out with no time for themselves. Jane’s birthday is coming up, so Coco suggests that rather than give in to the daily grind of obligations and do nothing, they celebrate Jane’s birthday with a weekend away, just for themselves at a fabulous high-end spa.
And because they are looking for calm and pampering, they agree not to invite Mel, who they fear would interrupt their Zen luxury experience.
The Solaris Spa is an oasis clearly catering to the monied crowd. (The script has Coco note that they got a discount through her work to cover off how these three working women can afford this level of luxury). Spa owner Shanti (Erika Heynatz), a blonde Amazonian goddess, greets them and personally invites them to her guided medication class.
On the way to their gorgeous suite, Jane catches the eye of Kai (Adam Demos), a gorgeous Aussie yoga teacher with the body of a god. In other words, this isn’t just a spa, it’s also the land of comedy movie cliches setting us up for mayhem and romance.
Fair enough. Part of what can make for great comedy is presenting cliche experiences and then having fun with or subverting expectations in clever ways.
But of course, there is the “wild factor” cliche to add to this mix. In this case, it’s Sophie (who can’t say no) having surreptitiously invited Mel, albeit hoping she would not come. But Mel arrives just in time to disrupt the trio’s calm with a suitcase full of sparkly clothes, dildos, and a machine to make her favourite cocktail. She’s loud, louche, and chaotic. The immediate reaction is. ‘How is this woman a successful travel blogger?’
When they work, big, dumb comedies are laugh-out-loud funny because they’re built on creating larger-than-life chaos out of normal situations that go sideways. Exaggeration is part of the fun. Except when the exaggerated circumstances and even some of the dialogue is so out of whack that they’re just not funny. Or believable. Or interesting.
And much of what ensues in Spa Weekend falls into those three categories, which also makes thing predictable and dull.
Lucas and Moore, the film’s co writers and directors, are capable of creative and funny. As noted previously, they wrote The Hangover — one of the cleverest comedies of the last few decades — and the sequel that managed to repeat the same formula with great results.
They did less well with their Bad Moms movies. Thumbs up for wanting to make funny movies about women that aren’t conventional. But could it be that they don’t really understand how to write comedy for women?
To be fair, there are some funny lines here and there, but the set pieces and the dialogue are so deeply cliched that if you had told me this was a film written by AI, I would believe you. The film feels like it was written by people who don’t actually know any adult women.
This is where their excellent cast comes in, who commit to their characters and make them believable, and unapologetic about their quirks and flaws. They manage to rise above the material.
Spa Weekend wants to take us through chaos and leave us on a high note. People screw up because they’re flawed. Those flaws create the madness that drives the movie and by the end, everyone has been through craziness together and also learned something about themselves: they need to change and remind themselves that the love of friends is unwavering and precious.
Those of us who enjoy the genre were expecting that from this buddy comedy. Unfortunately, despite that charismatic cast, a soft landing doesn’t rescue what came before.
Spa Weekend. Written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Starring Leslie Mann, Isla Fisher, Anna Faris, and Michelle Buteau. In theatres, August 21.