Movie Number 34 of 2026
The Movie: Spa Weekend
The Cinema: Hoyts Victoria Gardens
Runtime: One hour 37 minutes
Stars: 2.5
This is a bad movie. It's okay that it's a bad movie. It's not criminally bad. It's a film you can watch and know that it's bad and come away from it thinking, yeah, there were some mildly entertaining bits to it, but that's it. It's not Eyes Wide Shut bad (pretentious overhyped Kubrick). It's not The Room bad (So bad it has a cult following.... YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, LISA!). It's not Terrence Mallick's Tree of Life bad (Subjectively, I found it complete wank). It's not Cats bad (where to enjoy it, you're probably better off stoned.)
Spa Weekend has done a disservice cinema by having a pretty good cast and giving them a particularly awful script.
On their own, Anna Faris (who appears to have gone a bit overboard with the botox) Leslie Mann, Michelle Buteau and Isla Fisher are all pretty decent comic actors. They have tried to make the best of the script, but with little success.
Jane (Mann), an overworked, late forty-something lawyer and single mum has absolutely no time for herself, caring for teenage kids and an aging father. Coco (Buteau) had always been the loud, angry friend, but has become even more so since her divorce. Sophie (Faris) is an overworked personal assistant come nanny to a super-rich guy). The three of them, needing a break, take themselves off for a spa weekend, making the conscious decision to not invite the fourth in their group, Mel (Fisher). Mel is a trainwreck of a chaos agent. Read she has fewer boundaries than a country football field and absolutely no filter.
Of course, Sophie backhandedly invites Mel along and their plans for a quiet weekend go out the window. Jane discovers a cute yoga instructor. Coco has a sort of reconciliation with her ex. Sophie grows a spine, and Mel... yeah, well Mel.
There is a lot of rather dodgy over-acting on top of the horrendous script.
On the plus side, the spa was filmed at the Sheraton on the Gold Coast, and the film used a lot of Australian actors as their filler cast.
However, I'm not going to forgive the script. Written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who have written such films as Bad Moms and The Hangover, this is just more of the same with peri-menopausal women. It has the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and the plot goes from situation to situation like a drunk toddler.
I wonder what could have been done if women had written the script.
This is slated as Bridesmaids with middle-aged women. It's not. Unsurprisingly, Bridesmaids, still one of the funniest women's comedies about, was written by women.
It's not that hard.
Don't bother with this - there's not much point other than it is pretty to look at. This does not redeem it in the slightest.
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