A whacky vacation comedy is a formula that rarely goes out of style, particularly when helmed by the collaborative duo Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, whose filmography includes 21 & Over, A Bad Moms Christmas and The Hangover. The writer-directors turn their attention to an all-female ensemble led by Isla Fisher, Anna Faris, Michelle Buteau and Leslie Mann as Jane, Mel, Coco and Sophie.
The four women have been best friends since middle school, their friendship surviving the transition from their 20s into their 30s. Adulthood has gradually pulled them in different directions, with careers, family and personal obligations leaving little room for the friendship that once defined them. Jane is a single mother who prioritizes work and family while neglecting her dating life. Coco is recently divorced, carrying unresolved childhood trauma and anger issues. Mel is the resident troublemaker, drifting through life without much stability or direction. Sophie, meanwhile, is an overworked, underpaid people-pleaser who has become increasingly consumed by her demanding boss.
Over lunch, Coco proposes that the group celebrate Jane’s birthday with a getaway to a luxury spa in Palm Springs. Their last massage, she jokes, was during a mammogram, “hanging out with your homegirls is essential to survival,” she insist. After years of devoting themselves to careers, children and everyone around them, surely one weekend devoted to themselves, it couldn’t hurt to trade their work pens for piña coladas for the weekend.
What follows is an assortment of spa escapades: massages, meditation, yoga with goats, seaweed wraps, mud baths and eel-foot peels, alongside increasingly absurd sexual mishaps. Yet for a three-day getaway, the weekend somehow feels interminable. This is supposed to be paradise for these women, and they make that abundantly clear: “I never wanna go home.”
The film’s underlying message is considerably more sincere than its comedy: women who spend their lives caring for everyone else can so easily lose sight of themselves. Friends become placeholders when work takes precedence, and motherhood, relationships and other responsibilities consume the time once reserved for one another. The spa becomes a temporary sanctuary where these women are reminded that caring for themselves is as equally important as taking care of others.
The ensemble is undeniably appealing, with Mann, Faris, Buteau and Fisher bringing enough charisma to make their friendship believable even when the material around them falters. There is something genuinely refreshing about seeing middle-aged women placed at the center of a broad comedy and watching the film embrace the idea that aging can be its own form of liberation.
Despite this, the film’s celebration of female friendship is complicated by the way its women are written. The characters too often feel constructed through a distinctly male comedic gaze, reduced to broad archetypes rather than fully realized women. Most glaringly, Coco falls into the familiar stereotype of the angry, aggressive Black woman, a characterization the film acknowledges without meaningfully interrogating. Her joke that “white friends can be so hard” gestures toward the racial dynamics at play, but the screenplay ultimately uses the stereotype more than it challenges it.
The contrast becomes even more apparent in the treatment of the male characters and love interests, who are frequently positioned as the more rational and level-headed counterparts to the women’s supposed chaos. For a comedy ostensibly interested in giving women the freedom to be messy, complicated and unapologetically themselves, it is frustrating that so much of that messiness is framed as something inherently ridiculous. The cast does what it can with the material, and there are flashes of the chemistry that could have made Spa Weekend genuinely memorable.
Unfortunately, Spa Weekend plays the premise almost entirely safe; its upbeat tone and familiar formula offer a certain comfort, but the comedy rarely feels as fresh or as funny as the film believes it is. Whacky vacation comedies are supposed to be escapism, and Spa Weekend makes the experience feel less like a rejuvenating escape and more like a vacation that overstays its welcome. My audience, at least, seemed to find plenty to enjoy, erupting in laughter throughout the screening; and perhaps that is the most valuable thing I walked away with.
