Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar’ on Hulu, in Which Kristen Wiig Takes The Joke Too Far

Now on Hulu, Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar comes from Kristen Wiig and her longtime comedy partner Annie Mumolo — they co-wrote this and screenplay Oscar nominee Bridesmaids together . The two play a pair of joined-at-the-hip Midwestern dorkettes taking a long-overdue vacation, and the buzz is that it plays like a long-lost SNL skit. Believable, yes, but let’s determine if it’s more than just two funnyladies talking goofy for 100 or so minutes.

BARB AND STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) work together, live together, do everything together in their small mid-American town of Soft Rock, Nebraska. Wunza a widow, wunza divorcee (does it matter which? Barely), and from the look of their poofy hair and omnipresent culottes (if you don’t know what they are, the movie defines the term on a title card), it could be 1988, and like 45 minutes in, we finally get a smartphone reference that confirms it is indeed not 1988. They chatter endlessly in their nasally Midwestern patois from their first sip of coffee ’til they settle into their beds, situated side-by-side in their heavily overdecorated house. They belong to a Talking Club where the topics are dictated by a woman whose demeanor is best described as passive-aggressive Panzer. Their world is small. They pronounce the “a” in “Don Cheadle.” They seem reasonably happy, I guess.

But they lose their jobs as furniture saleswomen when the store closes down. Freshly unemployed, they bump into a sun-bronzed friend on the street who tells them about the bliss she found in Vista del Mar, a Florida vacation heaven. It’s a “soul douche,” she says, and it hits home with Barb and Star. “Haven’t you ever wondered if the real ocean sounds like our noise machine?”, Star asks, which is a reasonable question. So they book a week.

Meanwhile, somewhere else, who knows where exactly, and who cares really, a supervillainess the credits refer to as Sharon Gordon Fisherman (you’ll squint when you see her, and I won’t say who plays her for fear of spoiling stuff, but you’ll probably figure it out) schemes to kill everyone in her hometown of Vista del Mar because she has a skin condition that renders her sheet-white and she was teased so much she became the creature you see before you. In her employ is a boy named Yoyo (Reyn Doi) and a secret agent-type hunky fleshwad named Edgar (Jamie Dornan), who’s dispatched to Vista del Mar to get the ball rolling on the mass extermination.

Fate intervenes, as it always does in movies. Edgar’s path crosses with Barb and Star, they share a drink that’s the color and potency of Lysol toilet cleaner, and wake up the next morning stacked atop each other. Barb and Star’s big plans to ride a banana boat together and buy a lot of shit with shells glued on it and hit the buffets and go snorkeling (although that’s an activity that limits their abilities to blither-blather ad infinitum) gets interesting. The villain acts eccentric from a secret lair, the protagonists piffle about, Edgar bursts into a musical number on the beach and I won’t say exactly what happens but none of it matters in the least.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Barb and Star is Spy Kids with crude double-entendres crossed with a middle-aged Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, with a supervillain that could be Dr. Evil’s lover or sister (or both?).

Performance Worth Watching: Give credit to Wiig and Mumolo for really throwing themselves into this nonsense.

Memorable Dialogue: Star writes about her feelings in a letter — handwritten of course — to Edgar: “Dearest Edgar… I’m the disgusting woman from last night.”

Sex and Skin: Innuendo; songs about “boobies.”

Our Take: Barb and Star has an enormous amount of energy, weirdness and color, tossing in loud musical bits, goofy characters and garish set pieces, and it’s all quite annoying. This is one of those movies where we wait around for it to get funny and it never does, or else it already started being funny and we just missed it like the last commuter train to oblivion. I laughed out loud once (see “memorable dialogue”) and was generally amused by the concept, but was quickly worn out by it, and yearned for the real characters and emotions Wiig and Mumolo crafted for Bridesmaids, here replaced by silly one-trick caricatures that prove dithering Midwesterners are complicated women too, sort of, in the sense that they’re sexual beings, or at least very strange sexual beings, and not quite empty vessels, but not quite full enough to justify 107 minutes of movie.

Maybe if the screenplay didn’t bother with the tres stoopide generically plotting supervillain plot and focused on the unusual friendship between its main characters, it would’ve been more effective. It diddlefarts incessantly, opening with a sequence in which Yoyo works as a newspaper delivery boy that has no bearing whatsoever on the setting and tone of the rest of the film, drops in silly lounge-act comedy songs by Richard Cheese (real name: Mark Johnathan Davis), continues to prove that Dornan is either an eternal non-presence or has yet to find the right project for his skill set, includes a couple celeb cameos and generally fishes and flails for jokes that might hit with some audiences, but man, I dunno. I give no guarantee whatsoever on that noodle-armed assertion.

I have questions. Do Barb and Star have inner lives? Are they grieving, disappointed, competitive? Are they content with their BFFs sitch or do they wish their lives were different? Do they yearn, you know, really really yearn? Who knows. But it’s not fair to the movie that is if I lust for what it could be, and what it is, is an overstretched premise that’s like (swallows hard) a long-lost SNL skit. Distill it down to three or four seven-minute sketches, and it’s a funny satire of Midwestern personalities and platitudes that maybe lightly skewers how coastal-types see folk in the flyover states. It doesn’t lack for effort in execution, but in concept, it needs something more than just Hey Look At These Weirdos For A While. The movie tries to be about The Power of Friendship, but I’m here to assure you that no, it’s really not.

Our Call: SKIP IT. A movie can look like rotten tripe in a trough and make no logical sense whatsoever but if it’s funny, then hooray, we win. It all boils down to laughs, and Barb and Star doesn’t deliver nearly enough of them.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar