Directors: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Writers: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Stars: Leslie Mann, Anna Faris, Michelle Buteau
Synopsis: Three friends go on a spa weekend that descends into chaos when their trainwreck friend joins, leading to hilarious consequences.
Rarely has a movie felt less real than Jon Lucas and Scott Moore’s Spa Weekend. The screenwriting duo behind Todd Phillips’ The Hangover (and its sequels) and the directors of Bad Moms give us one of the biggest “this movie doesn’t exist” products of all time, one that attempts to be a big-screen comedy event but fails at virtually every turn. It’s a real shame, because the quartet of women leading the fray are all individually talented and have been funny in movies beyond this one, but they are all wasted inside a premise that gets tiresome relatively fast and does its ensemble zero favors.
Anyone who has been calling January “the dumping ground of movies” must now relegate that title to August, because nothing in Spa Weekend feels engineered for the big screen. This is the type of movie you’d buy at a Walmart bargain bin, or, in more apt 2026 terms, generate on ChatGPT. Every line, every situation, every character, every image, feels artificial. It has more in common with a commercial than it does a film you’d willingly pay money to see on the big screen. Worst of all, though, it is terribly unfunny. Lucas and Moore mistake endless shouting for comedic situations, and fill their entire movie with one loud shouting match after the next, as the titular Spa Weekend quickly turns into a total nightmare.
I’ll give them this, at least the premise is simple. Three women, Jane (Leslie Mann), Coco (Michelle Buteau), and Sophie (Anna Faris), go to a spa resort in the hopes of relaxing from the day-to-day operations of their increasingly busy lives. Jane is a lawyer whose responsibilities as a single mom prevent her from doing anything outside of work and parenting. Coco is still reeling from a painful divorce, and Sophie can’t seem to stand up to her misogynistic boss who has been manipulating her at every turn.
They hope that, by going to a spa, their worries will be washed away momentarily…until the friend they didn’t invite, Mel (Isla Fisher), shows up unannounced. To put it politely, Mel is a bit of a loudmouth. She says (read: shouts) what she thinks, and, well, apparently, hilarity ensues, but I waited, desperately waited for a scene where I would laugh. It never happened. This is a movie that thinks it’s funny by engaging in lazy, crude “extreme slapstick,” but none of it actually garnered a chuckle out of me.
The whole thing is painfully telegraphed. You can clearly tell where it’s going from the moment it starts, especially once Mel is introduced. Of course, everyone hates her guts. Of course, she basically ruins the whole vibe of the relaxing spa weekend and kinda sets fire to the resort, which vehemently angers its general manager, but what do you think will happen in the end? I don’t even need to spell it out for you – it’s written in the stars! It’s exactly what you think will happen, especially when Jane finds love in a hot yoga teacher, Coco attempts to make amends with her ex-husband, and Sophie finally stands up to her sexist boss. These archetypal stories are quickly resolved to a heartwarming conclusion, so foreseeable it’s almost laughable that all the “right notes” are hit, without a shred of emotional depth or humanity to make such an ending feel earned.
Instead, great comedic actors are relegated to a comedy of errors, haphazardly shot, lit, and edited, with the year’s worst musical score on display, clearly highlighting its lack of budget. Whenever a character mentions a song the production didn’t have the rights to, Philip White’s music will lightly reference it. I’ll admit, it’s a smart and economical choice, but the music itself sounds like royalty-free tunes you’d hear in a 2009 YouTube video edited on One True Media. The performances aren’t any better. Only Michelle Buteau gets one genuinely impassioned sequence near the end, but the rest of the cast deserve much better than to play one-note archetypes at this stage of their careers.
If Spa Weekend wanted to continue bringing the comedy back to the big screen, they’ve spectacularly failed. With Will Gluck’s horrendous One Night Only, there seems to be a recession indicator for actually funny movies. We might, however, reach the bottom of the barrel with this one. It’s actually so unfunny that it might be regressing our desires to have real comedies back on the big screen again. If this is what passes as comedy these days, maybe they all deserve to be relegated to Netflix….
