Hollywood has spent years demanding better roles for women over 40 and has now delivered four of them to a luxury spa, where the biggest obstacle is apparently a screenplay afraid to let anybody be unpleasant for long. “Spa Weekend” opens Friday with Leslie Mann, Anna Faris, Michelle Buteau and Isla Fisher playing friends on a getaway. The writers and directors are Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the team behind The Hangover. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calls the result a female answer to that film that has somehow misplaced the jokes. Equal opportunity has finally reached the stage where women can receive their own disappointing legacy comedy.
The premise should work. Four distinct personalities enter an expensive resort carrying romantic problems, career problems and friendship problems. One member of the group, Fisher’s Mel, is the person nobody quite wants there. That setup contains the possibility of actual social cruelty, awkwardness and recognition. According to the Guardian review, the movie backs away. The abrasive friend turns out to be lovable, emotional knots loosen and the material becomes sentimental where The Hangover was willing to be stupid, mean and chaotic. The film borrows the architecture of a rowdy comedy and then installs safety rails around every dangerous corner.
This is not a complaint that women should be written like male characters. It is a complaint that studio feminism too often confuses representation with insulation. A comedy can put middle-aged women at the center and still let them be selfish, foolish, rude, horny, jealous or wrong. In fact, that is where the useful representation tends to begin. The Guardian review’s frustration is that the film seems to want the marketing advantage of a wild girls’ weekend while preserving a warm lesson underneath every mess. Nobody is allowed to remain the friend the group genuinely dislikes because the friendship must eventually validate the product.
The Independent’s summer movie guide lists “Spa Weekend” among a crowded Aug. 21 release slate, which makes the formula even more understandable. Familiar stars, recognizable writers, a familiar genre, and a clean one-sentence pitch are useful in a theatrical market where getting adults to leave the house is difficult. The same logic also produces movies that feel assembled from components audiences have already approved. Take “The Hangover”. Replace Las Vegas with wellness luxury. Replace the male ensemble. Add emotional growth. Do not scare anyone. A creative industry has reinvented the franchise as a spa treatment for the franchise.
The target here is not the cast, who have all proved they can be much funnier than safe material allows. It is the habit of selling cultural progress as a reskinned old template. For years, executives answered criticism about narrow representation by remaking existing properties with a different demographic in the center. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it creates the odd implication that equality means receiving the same exhausted concept previously reserved for men. Women do not need a female Hangover any more than men need a male Bridesmaids. They need comedies confident enough to let their characters become specific rather than symbolic.
The movie also arrives at a moment when theatrical comedy is struggling to define what makes people buy a ticket instead of waiting for streaming. Big franchises offer spectacle. Horror remains cheap and communal. Adult comedies once sold the pleasure of watching recognizable people behave badly in a room full of strangers. That genre depended on discomfort and surprise, two qualities large studios now tend to treat as risk factors. “Spa Weekend” appears to have all the production signals of a broad adult comedy while lacking the willingness to make its characters truly embarrassing. The result, according to the Guardian review, is not offensive or disastrous. It is something commercially more dangerous. It is bland enough that nobody needs to argue about it on the way home.
There is a missed opportunity in the age of the characters. Friendship in middle age is rich material because the stakes are different from a college comedy. Careers harden. Divorces rearrange social groups. Parents age. People discover that a friend they loved at 25 can become exhausting at 50. A luxury weekend can expose class differences, loneliness, and resentment without turning into a lecture. The setup of one friend nobody really likes could have carried an entire sharp comedy by itself. Making her secretly the emotional truth-teller is safer and less recognizable. Real adult friendship sometimes includes the uncomfortable discovery that the group chat would, in fact, be healthier without one person in it. Hollywood apparently decided that was too mean for a movie built from “Hangover” DNA.
That makes the film a useful little cultural artifact even if it never becomes a hit. Hollywood has spent years rediscovering familiar comedy templates, swapping casts and updating the setting while trying to keep the audience recognition that made the original formula valuable. A spa is almost comically suited to that process. It offers luxury, confession, friendship conflict and a controlled environment where nobody has to explain why the characters are stuck together. But if the chaos is sanded down until everyone can still make their treatment appointment, the remake has preserved the architecture and removed the reason people remember the house.
There is a broader cultural pattern too. Mainstream comedy has become cautious at the exact moment audiences are constantly told that everything is more transgressive than ever. Studios fear offense, theatrical failure, and social-media blowback. Streaming encourages broad, frictionless entertainment. Characters are sanded until nobody can object to the moral architecture. The resulting movie can contain profanity, sex jokes and chaos while still feeling strangely polite. That may be the strangest part of “Spa Weekend”. A film built around escape, excess, and bad decisions apparently needed everyone to emerge emotionally moisturized.
If Hollywood wants grown women to lead big comedies, why does it keep giving them old formulas with the sharp edges removed?
Sources
The Guardian: Spa Weekend review – female answer to The Hangover spreads the slush with the massage oilThe Independent: Summer Movie Guide 2026: Here’s what’s coming to theaters and streaming from May to August
The Guardian: Feel your feelings and reconnect with past passions: how to recover from burnout
