Spa Weekend (2026)

Two out of five. Not because Spa Weekend fails to try; because across ninety-seven minutes it tries at exactly the wrong things, over and over, until the good instincts buried in it never get room to breathe.

The setup is thin by design: Jane, Coco, and Sophie, three lifelong friends worn down by careers, marriages, and the general accounting of adulthood, book a long weekend at a Palm Springs resort to remember who they were before all that. Then Mel turns up uninvited, drags the group toward disaster, and the film spends its remaining ninety-odd minutes cycling through set pieces built to escalate rather than to reveal anything about the four women at the centre of them.

I kept waiting for the film to trust its cast. Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, and Anna Faris have all done sharper, sadder, funnier work elsewhere, together and apart. Not here. There are stretches where you can see them reaching for that register: a look held a beat too long, a line reading that suggests real exhaustion under the group’s exhausting behaviour. Michelle Buteau gets the closest to landing something, mostly because she seems to have decided early on that commitment beats calibration and just goes for it scene after scene. But the film keeps cutting away from anything that might sit still long enough to matter, back to another mishap, another prop gag, another beat that exists because the scene before it needed a bigger one to follow.

Directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore know this genre; they wrote The Hangover and Bad Moms, and you can feel the ambition to sit somewhere near that lineage. What made those films work, at their best, was that the chaos revealed character rather than replacing it. Here the chaos mostly just accumulates. A golf cart mishap plays for shock rather than for the specific humiliation of the specific person it happens to, and by the halfway mark it stops mattering which friend is at the centre of which disaster, because the film has stopped bothering to differentiate them under the noise.

There’s a kinder, smaller film somewhere in this material, one about four women renegotiating a friendship that has drifted under the weight of everything else in their lives. I caught glimpses of it. In the quieter transitions, a hallway conversation here, a look across a spa treatment table there, before the next set piece arrived to bury it again. The score plays this straight, all bright strings insisting on a warmth the screenplay hasn’t earned scene to scene, and the Palm Springs setting is handsome enough that the film occasionally looks better than it plays.

None of which makes Spa Weekend unwatchable. It moves fast, the cast plainly enjoys each other’s company between takes, and there’s a genuine chuckle or two scattered through the wreckage, though a comedy this stacked with talent owes its audience more than incident. I left wanting the film these four actors were capable of making, not the one that got in front of the camera instead.