Spa Weekend review – female answer to The Hangover spreads the slush with the massage oil

Jon Lucas and Scott Moore are the screenwriters who struck gold nearly 20 years ago with The Hangover, a brilliant stag-weekend nightmare comedy about what happens in Vegas, which sadly spawned a terrible (though lucrative) franchise. Now, as writers and directors, they have tried turning it around and making a movie about how middle-aged women behave on a longed-for spa weekend at a luxury-porn hotel. The result is a comedy without gags, a comedy which, for all the strenuous high-jinks, is afraid to be flippant or mean or, indeed, funny in any way.

Leslie Mann plays a hotshot lawyer called Jane who can’t make room in her life for romance; Anna Faris is goofy Sophie, PA to a rich asshole; Michelle Buteau is outspoken badass Coco, angry at her ex-husband dating again; and Isla Fisher is landed with the stridently unfunny role of Mel, a wild child who makes the other three nervous, but whose life-affirming no-filter honesty is going to break everyone’s emotional logjam and sort out their lives. As for Jane, it looks as if the hotel’s super-hot super-sensitive yoga teacher, Kai (Adam Demos), is going to hook up with her.

The potentially funny idea of the one woman in the friend group whom no one really likes might have been the grit in the oyster that produced the comedy pearl, but, of course, it has to turn out that they really do like Mel – and in a much slushier, more sentimental way than the guys in The Hangover came round to liking Zach Galifianakis’s character. There’s something bland in this movie’s massage oil.

● Spa Weekend is out on 20 August in Australia, and on 21 August in the UK and US