‘Spa Weekend’ Review: Four Women, One Resort, and Way Too Much Chaos For Checkout

Leslie Mann, Anna Faris, Michelle Buteau and Isla Fisher headline this new comedy from Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the writing team behind ‘The Hangover’ and the director duo behind ‘Bad Moms.’ The premise is simple. Three lifelong friends book a luxury spa getaway to reconnect, only for their wildest and least predictable pal to crash the trip and turn a weekend of massages into a weekend of mayhem.

It’s the kind of setup that has powered a small industry of female ensemble comedies over the past decade, and ‘Spa Weekend’ knows exactly which lane it’s driving in. This is not a movie interested in reinventing anything. It wants to put four gifted comedic actresses in one location and let them loose.

That willingness to just have fun is both the film’s biggest asset and its ceiling. Mann, Faris and Buteau settle into an easy, lived in rhythm as Jane, Sophie and Coco, three women who clearly have decades of shared history even when the script gives them thin individual arcs. Fisher, playing the trainwreck friend who upends their tranquility, throws herself at the physical comedy with total commitment, and there’s real pleasure in watching someone work this hard to sell a scene.

What holds the movie back is how familiar its comic engine feels. The set pieces, whether it’s a wellness activity gone sideways or a late night escapade around the resort, tend to hit similar beats without escalating into anything genuinely surprising. There’s a version of this film that pushes its chaos further or lets its characters get messier in more specific ways, and ‘Spa Weekend’ mostly settles for pleasant instead of memorable.

Where the movie does earn goodwill is in its emotional undercurrent. Underneath the coke jokes and pool deck disasters is a sincere point about how friendship gets neglected once careers and families take over, and how hard it is to carve out real time for the people who knew you before any of that. The film never digs especially deep into that idea, but it doesn’t need to. A light touch here works better than a lecture would.

The Palm Springs backdrop gives the whole thing a sun soaked, escapist glow that suits the tone, and at under an hour and forty minutes, ‘Spa Weekend’ never overstays its welcome. It arrives, causes its trouble, lets its characters land somewhere slightly wiser, and gets out before the goodwill runs dry. Adam Demos rounds out the cast as a resort employee who becomes an unwitting bystander to the group’s antics, and he’s used efficiently rather than overexposed.

None of this amounts to essential viewing, but there’s something genuinely satisfying about watching four talented comedic performers who are clearly enjoying each other’s company on screen. The chemistry between Mann, Faris, Buteau and Fisher papers over a script that rarely surprises, and it’s their rapport, more than any individual joke or set piece, that carries the film to the finish line.

I walked away from ‘Spa Weekend’ entertained without being especially moved, charmed by the cast without being won over by the writing around them. It’s a perfectly serviceable girls trip comedy that leans on star power to cover for a script running on autopilot, and that’s enough to make it a fun watch without making it a must see one. My score lands at 6 out of 10.

Have you booked your own trip to see ‘Spa Weekend,’ and did this quartet win you over? Let me know in the comments whether you agree with my verdict.