PLOT: Three friends go on a spa weekend that descends into chaos when their trainwreck friend joins, leading to hilarious consequences.
REVIEW: I love a great women-focused comedy, especially when the movie is willing to really go there. Bridesmaids turned food poisoning into one of the most memorable comedy sequences of the last twenty years. Girls Trip had absolutely no problem letting its characters get filthy, drunk, and completely out of control. When these movies work, it’s refreshing to watch the characters throw their dignity out the window.
Spa Weekend desperately wants to be one of those movies.
Written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the guys behind The Hangover and Bad Moms, Spa Weekend follows longtime friends Jane (Leslie Mann), Sophie (Anna Faris), Coco (Michelle Buteau), and Mel (Isla Fisher) as they head to a luxury resort for what is supposed to be a relaxing girls’ getaway. The only problem is that Mel wasn’t exactly invited. She’s the chaotic member of the group. The friend who turns every situation into a disaster, and her arrival pretty much guarantees their peaceful weekend is about to become anything but.
Before we even get to the resort, though, Spa Weekend feels like it takes its sweet time getting there, even though it’s about fifteen minutes in. The opening stretch has to introduce every character and every bit of baggage they’ll eventually need to overcome. It’s necessary setup, but it’s also a slog with cringe dialogue. For a comedy starring four women this naturally funny, the first act is surprisingly light on actual laughs.
Thankfully, things pick up once everyone finally arrives at the spa.
The biggest thing Spa Weekend has going for it is the cast. Mann, Faris, Buteau, and Fisher all have great chemistry together. They’re believable as longtime friends who love each other while also being completely sick of each other’s shit.
Mel could have been an unbearable character. But Fisher commits so completely to the role that she makes Mel fun to watch. At the same time, she finds just enough vulnerability underneath all of it to keep her from becoming a cartoon. Whenever the movie actually lets Fisher cut loose, you get a glimpse of the much funnier movie Spa Weekend could have been.
However, that’s ultimately the biggest problem: it never really cuts loose.
You can feel the movie preparing to “go there,” but the antics remain surprisingly tame. There’s a stolen golf cart, goats, drinking, sex talk, and the usual resort owner who’s had enough of their nonsense, but nothing reaches the level of insanity the movie keeps promising. It wants credit for being a raunchy R-rated comedy without ever becoming particularly raunchy.
There’s also something bizarrely artificial about how Lucas and Moore write these women. At times, the screenplay feels like they made a checklist of everything they assumed women could relate to on a girls’ weekend. Champagne? Check. Complaining about stupid or controlling men? Check. Walking into a room yelling, “Let’s go, bitches!” Check. An insanely attractive yoga instructor (Adam Demos)? Check.
After a while, it feels less like four specific women and more like someone googled “things women do on girls’ trips.” It often feels very obviously written by two men who probably should have handed the script to their wives, girlfriends, sisters, or literally any group of women and asked, “Does any of this actually sound right?” A lot of the jokes don’t land, and a few cross over into straight-up cringe territory. There’s also one cardinal sin of cliché dialogue that made me laugh for a reason the movie definitely didn’t intend. In the severely underseen They Came Together, there’s a running gag where someone storms out of a room, another character calls out, “Wait!” just a second too late, then mutters “Shit!” to themselves. And yep, it happens here.
The characters themselves also fit pretty comfortably into familiar boxes. Jane is the neurotic workaholic who needs to loosen up. Sophie is the people-pleaser who needs to finally stand up for herself. Coco is the angry one who needs to deal with why she’s so angry. Mel is the disaster friend whose behavior eventually reveals some deeper sadness underneath.
You can pretty much figure out where everyone is going emotionally from the moment they’re introduced.
That becomes more of a problem once the movie tries to get sincere. The central idea is that every friend group supposedly has one person the others don’t really like, and here that person is Mel. It’s actually a potentially funny and uncomfortable premise. But Spa Weekend never spends enough time showing us why these women have remained friends for so long. When the movie eventually asks us to invest emotionally in their friendship, it doesn’t hit as hard as it should. Movies like Bridesmaids could be absolutely ridiculous and still make you care about the friendship underneath everything because that relationship felt real. Spa Weekend tells us these women matter deeply to each other, but it doesn’t always do enough to make us feel it.
Still, there’s something kind of nice about the fact that a movie like Spa Weekend even receives a theatrical run in 2026. Fifteen years ago, a 90-minute, R-rated comedy with a cast like this could have been a major hit. I just wish Spa Weekend had been willing to get as wild as the movies that inspired it.
And after everything I’ve mentioned, it may sound like I was sitting there waiting for the movie to end. I wasn’t. Spa Weekend isn’t a waste of time, and I’ve seen far worse comedies this year. In fact, I know I’ll eventually see it again with my wife, and I’m not dreading the inevitable. The entire cast is fun and the scenery is gorgeous. Once the actual weekend gets underway, there are just enough laughs to make it an easy enough watch.
At the end of the day, though, it’s just an average comedy that probably could have been a much better one.
Sometimes you just need the mimosas to kick in a little harder.
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