Review: Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, Where Comedy Dies a Slow Death

Almost a decade on from her big-screen breakthrough, Kristen Wiig has teamed up again with Bridesmaids co-writer Annie Mumolo for Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. But despite the film’s impressive comic pedigree, what follows is an unspirited affair that’s about as tedious as the constant, inane chatter of the titular gal pals. Recently made redundant from their jobs at a furniture store, where they mostly sat on a display sofa and reminisced about old times, Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) decide to leave their Midwestern town for the first time ever, paying a visit to the Florida party resort of Vista Del Mar in an effort to step out of their comfort zone and recapture the carefree spirit of their youth.

With none of the pathos or incisive wit of Wiig’s best work, Josh Greenbaum’s film seems to lean more toward the broad, off-the-cuff absurdity that she’s pulled off with aplomb in the past, but is never much more than a lightweight and half-hearted show of silliness. It certainly doesn’t help that the main characters are so thoroughly underdeveloped: Star and Barb’s exaggerated Midwestern politeness and cheery innocence can be endearing up to a point, but Wiig and Mumolo’s undercooked screenplay doesn’t give them much personality beyond these broad strokes, and to the point that you may have trouble telling them apart.

Of course, Wiig’s beloved Saturday Night Live tenure suggests that she doesn’t need a fully developed character to score laughs, and even Bridesmaids is essentially a parade of stock figures. Here, though, we get the sense that Wiig and Mumolo have a bit too much affection for their characters, preventing them from bringing out any of the hidden, more uncomfortable vulnerabilities that might have resulted in richer comedy. Early on, a “talking club” for middle-aged women illustrates the passive aggression that often simmers below the surface of relationships between women like Barb and Star, with Vanessa Bayer stealing the scene as the cheerily authoritarian host. But this is about as far as the film goes in challenging its characters’ sweet Midwestern demeanors, as it mostly relies on tame culture-clash scenarios and rote plot developments to introduce conflict.

On a cocktail-fueled first night at their Vista Del Mar resort, Star and Barb have a wild encounter with Edgar (Jamie Dornan), a handsome but insecure younger man. This entanglement ends up driving a wedge between the pair, not least because their new romantic interest is also secretly a henchman for a mysterious criminal mastermind (also played by Wiig). Unbeknownst to them, their two-week trip has coincided with her outlandish plan to get revenge on the town of Vista Del Mar by killing everybody at the resort. Clashing awkwardly with what could’ve been a gentle, low-stakes story about friendship and aging, this thriller subplot feels weirdly tacked on. Its flimsy incoherence is probably intentional, but it ends up sucking even more of the life out of the film’s roughly sketched characters.

The film does have a feeling of loose, cartoonish unpredictability that prevents it from getting too one-note, but there’s very little in the way of imagination on display here. A talking crab with the voice of Morgan Freeman is a briefly amusing curveball, though cheekily parodying the actor’s baritone voiceover wisdom is surely now even more hackneyed than deploying it sincerely. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar ultimately gives the impression that its co-writers and stars are coasting, showing just as much disregard for other people’s judgments of them as their characters do. Perhaps best exemplified by its fixation on culottes, which a title card explains is a hugely popular garment for women of a certain age, their film never really feels like more than a half-formed in-joke between close friends.