Comedywise, Ian Fleming — not a funny man — has been a dubious influence on screen comedy for decades. Quite apart from full-on James Bond spoofs in the “Austin Powers” vein, elements and whole slabs of spoofy, outlandish Bond-inspired villainy have a way of popping up and weighing down all sorts of movies, the latest dispiriting example being “Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar,” now available to stream.
Is it a spoiler to mention who plays the evil genius causing all the grief in debut feature director Josh Greenbaum’s film? Let’s assume so. We’ll stay mum out of respect for the chief creatives on this project: Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who rightly secured Oscar nominations for their “Bridesmaids” screenplay a decade ago.
Here they’ve created a promising showcase inspired by any number of sketches Wiig and Mumolo cooked up in their Groundlings improv years in Los Angeles. Best friends forever, Barb and Star have never traveled outside their small Nebraska town called Soft Rock (clever name). Chipper, good-natured, they’ve been finishing each other’s sentences since childhood. They are case studies in Midwestern hard-r’s and borderline-Canadian vowel sounds, especially “a,” pronounced “aaaayyyy.” (I know the sound well; if you grow up in Wisconsin and then move to Minnesota, it’s basically too late to ever change the results.)
Thanks to sudden unemployment and a tip from a friend, Barb and Star decide to bust out of Soft Rock and fly to the (fictional) Vista Del Mar resort on Florida’s gulf coast. Here, the men are plentiful and ogling, and the boardwalk trinkets are faaaaaaabulous.
That’s a decent premise for a comedy. Around it, though, “Barb and Star” preoccupies valuable screen time with its wearying Bond-movie contraption. The prologue deals with a paperboy (Reyn Doi) entering a secret lair to join an icy villainess in her plan to uncork a torrent of genetically modified mosquitoes on an entire city — the very city where Barb and Star are vacationing.
Five minutes into this thing, I was, like: What the hell? Why? I mean, I know why: “Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar” needs a peg on which to hang its characters and its situations, and to include the evil genius’s boy-toy Edgar (Jamie Dornan, pretty funny) who gets mixed up bed-wise and danger-wise with our heroines. Star, Wiig’s character, is reeling from a cheating ex. “Men find me disgusting. And I’m OK with that!” she notes, brightly if unconvincingly.
Mumolo’s Barb, meantime, finds Dornan’s Edgar as enticing as Star does. There’s some implied, crazy, drug-fueled three-way sex, and a fair bit of raunch suggesting that this was an R-rated project that got revised downward to secure the PG-13 rating, if anyone even looks at those ratings anymore in lockdown.
Director Greenbaum works with a pretty heavy hand, though to the degree “Barb and Star” is really a frustrated musical, it’s a movie that benefits from that frustration and its occasional bursts of song and dance. Cameo day-players include Andy Garcia and Reba McEntire, plus Morgan Freeman providing the voice of a talking crab. All that is more fun than everything to do with lost microchips and genetically modified killer mosquitoes and a misunderstood villainess’s backstory.
Wiig and Mumolo work so easily and smoothly together, you feel like an ingrate for not enjoying their efforts more in these script circumstances (especially since they wrote it). Now and then, though, the payoffs arrive. And with Mumolo in particular, a sentence such as “I’m Barb and this is Star — and you are?” turns into a rhapsodic ode to Minnesota-speak, a la “Fargo,” but in this case, it’s one state down and to the left.
‘BARB AND STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR’
2 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for rude sexual content, drug use and some strong language)
Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes
Playing: Now available via video on demand
