Honestly, I was a little excited to watch Spa Weekend, written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the creative duo behind an entertaining film like Bad Moms and, of course, the legendary The Hangover. I was so excited, in fact, that despite it not really being my thing, I even made the mistake of watching the trailer before seeing the film. And what I saw was a group of middle-aged women “having fun” against a backdrop with a color palette as bright as the sun hitting your windshield during a road trip, along with behavior strange enough to make you wonder, “Is this what the film thinks women having fun looks like?”
Of course, the idea of “a group of female friends bored with their lives deciding to go on a wild weekend getaway together” is such an easy premise for a comedy, and such an almost conventional story formula that it should at least make it possible to enjoy what you are watching to some extent. And yet, somehow, even within this formula, the film fails to find a place for itself.
In Spa Weekend, Jane, Sophie, and Coco decide to go to a luxury spa resort to celebrate Jane’s birthday. Their plan to escape their lives for a few days, after years of drifting apart, is joined by Mel, a friend from their past who tends to cause a little more trouble than the others. And, as you can probably imagine, the supposedly peaceful weekend quickly turns into complete chaos after Mel arrives. Sophie’s work gets complicated, Coco’s ex-husband re-enters her life, and Jane begins getting close to Kai, a yoga instructor. The problems the four friends have been carrying for years, their old relationships, and the fact that they have drifted apart all resurface during this short vacation. In other words, the film has a story as simple and useful as a comedy could possibly need. Four friends, a luxury hotel, a few old relationships, some fighting, and a woman who constantly makes everything even worse in the middle of it all. It is genuinely difficult to find easier material for a comedy. And yet, somehow, like a chef wasting the ingredients in front of them, the film tortures you without making you smile even once, refusing to give up on its determination to make the experience as unbearable as possible.
Spa Weekend plays it safe. It cannot bring out the comedy within itself. It is afraid to reach the rocks on the other side. What awaits us on the opposite shore is, if nothing else, an entertaining film with the flavor of an early-2000s comedy, the kind of film that neither makes you happy nor makes you unhappy. Spa Weekend cannot even manage that. It simply drifts aimlessly on the water.
