Leslie Mann, Michelle Buteau, Anna Faris and Isla Fisher provide scattered laughs in a comedy that gives them too little help. The wellness jokes are tired, the sentiment unconvincing, and the cast deserve better material.
Spa Weekend has an appealing cast and too few good jokes to justify gathering them together. Scott Moore and Jon Lucas, who write and direct, send four friends on a spa break and make wellness culture the target of their misbehaviour. There is nothing wrong with that starting point, or with making an undemanding comedy from it. The disappointment is how often the film settles for a familiar situation without finding anything fresh for its performers to do.
Michelle Buteau fares best as Coco, helped by a character who feels more developed than her companions. Her jokes provide some of the few occasions when the material seems equal to the person delivering it. Isla Fisher supplies welcome energy as the disruptive Mel, giving the group an unruliness the comedy needs. Leslie Mann and Anna Faris contribute to the easy rapport, but their presence also makes the thinness of the writing harder to overlook. We can enjoy these women together without finding much of what happens to them funny.
Moore and Lucas are less successful at making the spa worth satirising. The jokes about wellness are predictable, and the film shows little appetite for examining why its characters might want what self-care promises them. A broad comedy need not become a lecture about the business of feeling better, but it needs to notice something beyond the obvious. Here, too much of the humour depends on putting familiar comic types into situations that remain familiar after the disruption has begun.
We grew bored with the repeated slapstick because it kept giving the friends the same limited things to play. The set pieces have the separate, self-contained feel of sketches, and editors James Thomas and Delaney Del Vecchio do not make them accumulate into a satisfying story. A sequence can contain activity without moving a relationship forward, which is the recurring problem here. At 97 minutes, the film is hardly an endurance test, but its short running time does not prevent it from feeling stretched.
It would be unfair to load that failure onto cinematographer Danny Ruhlmann, production designer Michelle McGahey or composer Philip White. The difficulty is already there in the broadly drawn characters and the jokes they have been given. More elaborate surroundings would not sharpen this treatment of wellness, and music cannot earn the affection that the writing has neglected to establish. Moore and Lucas needed to be more demanding of their own material before asking the other departments to support it.
The friendship comedy also needs its quieter passages to explain why these particular people matter to one another. Spa Weekend has the performers’ chemistry to help with that, but its sentiment is shallow enough to feel like another requirement being ticked off. The warmth is welcome; the assumption that warmth alone will make us care is less so. Against the ordinary standards of an ensemble farce, it falls short on both sustained laughter and convincing character work.
There are pleasures here, chiefly Buteau’s delivery and Fisher’s willingness to bring some disorder to proceedings. Those are substantial comic resources, and occasionally they produce the loose, companionable entertainment the premise suggests. Too often, though, we are waiting for another such moment while the film repeats a joke or asks for a feeling it has not earned. Unless this cast alone is enough to settle the evening, we would make other plans.
