comedy

Spa Weekend

Don’t book a reservation for this bad vacation comedy.

There have been many smart and funny chick flicks like “Pretty Woman,” “Bad Moms,” “Bridesmaids,” “The Proposal,” “Mean Girls,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” but “Spa Weekend” is not one of them. Full of cursing, cynicism, and desperation, it thinks a raunchy comedy requires dick jokes, animals, partying, drugs, and screaming to be comical. In fact, the screaming represents “Fingernails of the Blackboard” effect.

We meet four childhood friends in their adulthood. Three of them are moms, and one of them is a total nutcase. Jane (Leslie Mann) is a lawyer who can barely fit a date in her busy schedule (she says she can go out to dinner with him three months from now, but how does she know it won’t be too late?), Sophie (Anna Faris) has a needy, childish boss, Coco (Michelle Buteau) is too angry to see a therapist, and Mel (Isla Fisher)-who knows what she’s doing right now. They say she’s in Paris, but Zoey Deutch’s character said the same thing in “Not Okay.” Minus her, the three moms decide to take a spa weekend to escape from the stress of their new lives. Their place is like Shangri-La, with the blue oceans, sexy yoga instructors, and free cosmetics. All is right with them, until Sophie invites Mel at the last minute.

Half the time, she makes life Hell for her friends and the hotel staff, while the other half, they all have fun under her vulgar and stoned eccentricity. In fact, like Stifler in the “American Pie” movies, this is one of those cases regarding Mel being a “fun dick,” which is supposed to make life fun for the friends.

“Spa Weekend” was written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, whose best comedies happen to be “The Hangover” and “Bad Moms.” But coming on the heels of “Office Christmas Party,” “A Bad Moms Christmas,” and “Jexi” (which I made the right choice of skipping), they need to reflect on those brilliant comedies and remember how funnier and smarter they were. And splicing the personalities of the three moms and the Wolf Pack doesn’t constitute originality. It constitutes boredom.

When it tries to go for the emotional jugular, it ends up being repetitive, and when it tries to be funny, the jokes fall flat. I sat in a theater and waited and waited for a laugh, but I only got one tickle. And that’s when the hotel manager (Erika Heynatz) says if she sees the girls again, she’ll have her security guards “shoot to kill. And this was right in front of a cop. But the rest is desperate and lazy-the kind of humor we’ve seen before and wonder why movies try to mimic the better versions.

Mann, Fisher, Faris, and Buteau are all fine, funny talents who have proven their worth before and still can. But they’re all wasted in a crass movie with very little sentimentality and more cursing and cliches. It’s all too predictable and exhausting to be cute and funny. And when dick jokes fail (and both “Super Troopers 3” and “Balls Up” had no sense of humor of the subject), you know the movie wants to be funny, but doesn’t know the meaning of the word. And if these women think their mud baths and massages are exhilarating (and I can already feel a hand massage after seeing Mann’s character get one), then I seriously need a massage after watching this lackluster comedy.

Rating: 1 out of 4.

Categories: comedy

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