‘Spa Weekend’ Review: Four Comedy Veterans Check In, But The Getaway Never Quite Relaxes Into Greatness
‘Spa Weekend’ arrives as a late summer counterprogramming play, the kind of R rated ensemble comedy that used to be a reliable multiplex staple and now feels like something of an endangered species. Leslie Mann, Anna Faris, Michelle Buteau and Isla Fisher play four childhood friends whose grown up lives have drifted into single motherhood, demanding jobs and general burnout, and who reunite for a supposedly relaxing weekend at a luxury resort. The trip is meant to be a quiet reset for the group, or at least for the three friends who planned it without telling their wildest, most unpredictable member she was invited at all.
Jon Lucas and Scott Moore write and direct here, and their fingerprints are all over the film’s DNA, having previously built entire careers out of watching likable people behave catastrophically once responsibility gets tossed out the window. That pedigree sets an expectation of chaos executed with real precision, and it places ‘Spa Weekend’ squarely inside a lineage of vacation gone wrong comedies that audiences have happily returned to again and again. Shot on location with a resort setting that practically begs for slow motion pool shots and questionable decision making, the film knows exactly which genre furniture it wants to sit in.
What actually works here is simpler than the premise suggests, and it comes down almost entirely to the chemistry between the four leads. Fisher is the clear engine of the movie, throwing herself into the role of the group’s designated wild card with a physical commitment that makes even her most ridiculous bits, and there are several genuinely ridiculous bits involving a golf cart and a small herd of yoga goats, land harder than the script probably earns. Buteau gets the most textured material of the bunch, playing a recently divorced woman whose anger and humor feel like they belong to an actual person rather than a type.
The trouble is that everyone else in the ensemble is stuck playing a fairly thin archetype, and the movie never quite finds the time or the interest to fill those characters in. Mann’s workaholic lawyer and Faris’s overworked doormat both get a handful of sharp line readings, but their inner lives stay frustratingly undersketched, and a late breaking romantic subplot with a resort yoga instructor arrives with almost no groundwork laid beneath it. The film’s pacing is scattershot too, racing through set pieces that could use another beat to build and then lingering on emotional reconciliations that haven’t quite earned their sincerity yet.
There is a real attempt buried in here to say something honest about how friendships fray under the weight of adult obligation, and about the guilt of choosing yourself even for a single weekend. I appreciated that ambition, and there are individual scenes, particularly a chaotic pool confrontation and a wonderfully unhinged confession involving cryptocurrency, where the cast’s timing briefly makes the whole enterprise sing. But the tonal whiplash between broad slapstick and soft sentimental uplift never fully resolves, and the back half in particular leans on musical cues and montage shortcuts that undercut the messier, funnier version of this movie hiding underneath.
I walked away from ‘Spa Weekend’ wishing the script trusted its cast as much as its cast clearly trusted each other, because four performers with this much comic instinct deserved sharper, stranger material than a fairly conventional redemption arc. It is breezy enough to pass a hot afternoon without regret, propped up almost entirely by Fisher’s fearlessness and Buteau’s underrated dramatic bite, but it rarely reaches for anything beyond pleasant familiarity. My honest verdict lands at 6 out of 10, a genuinely funny cast doing its best with a script that never matches their energy.
Have you checked into this particular retreat yet, and did the chaos win you over or leave you cold, let me know your verdict in the comments below.
