Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar (15)

Barb and Star are loquacious best friends who live and work in the sleepy Midwestern town of Taylorsville. The day after they are made redundant, Barb and Star encounter neighbour Mickey, who is luminous from a recuperative break at Vista Del Mar on the coast of Florida. Impulsively, the best friends check into the Palm Vista Hotel in Florida and excitedly survey the poolside talent for sparks of holiday romance. The women are bewitched by handsome clam inspector Edgar.

LondonNet Film Review
Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar (15)

What does happiness look like? A smile rippling across the face of a gurgling baby? A puppy chewing enthusiastically on a squeaky toy? Two middle-aged women with a penchant for culottes and shell-encrusted seaside souvenirs straddling an inflatable banana boat? Ten years after Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig seduced us with their uproarious, filthy-minded script for Bridesmaids, the delightful double-act collaborates on the page and screen for a deeply dippy road movie…

Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar warmly hugs madness and refuses to let go, spinning an outlandish tale of sisterly solidarity in the face of adversity that relishes ridiculous plot twists. Each amusingly inane conversation between the eponymous heroines, foolishly dismissed as “a couple of pathetic Stellas trying to get their groove back”, tees up a punchline when you least expect it. Director Josh Greenbaum garnishes his unapologetically feelgood tonic with barnstorming song and dance numbers, including a chest-beating solo for Jamie Dornan, who kicks sand in the face of self-consciousness as he vocalises his character’s inner turmoil as a rock ballad to an audience of bemused birds (“Seagull on a tyre/Am I in heaven or am I in hell?”) Greenbaum’s rollicking escapade is closer to heaven.

Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) are loquacious best friends who live and work in the sleepy Midwestern town of Taylorsville. The day after they are made redundant, Barb and Star encounter neighbour Mickey (Wendi McLendon-Covey), who is luminous from a recuperative break at Vista Del Mar on the coast of Florida. “I feel like I got a soul douche!” coos Mickey. Barb and Star take a long, hard look at their lives. “It feels like we lost our shimmer… like we’re fading away,” laments Star.

Impulsively, the best friends check into the Palm Vista Hotel in Florida and excitedly survey the poolside talent for sparks of holiday romance. The women are bewitched by handsome clam inspector Edgar (Dornan) and unwittingly become pawns in a diabolical doomsday plot involving a dermatologically compromised criminal mastermind, her inept henchman (Damon Wayans Jr) and a singing paper boy (Reyn Doi).

Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar is a snort-inducing tangle of plot threads and genres that will prove irresistible to anyone who craves an injection of pure, unabashed joy. Mumolo and Wiig are perpetually one smirk away from making each other corpse and Dornan gleefully dismantles his Fifty Shades Of Grey screen image. The script raises the anchor on realism during the opening credits and charts an unexpected course towards sun-kissed nirvana, including surprise cameos for an Oscar winner as a philosophising crustacean and a Grammy Award-winning country superstar as a salty siren.

– Jo Planter