107 min | PG-13 | February 12, 2021 | Lionsgate
Two inseparable friends from Soft Rock, Nebraska leave their furniture-store jobs and culottes behind for a pastel resort in Florida. There they walk straight into a supervillain’s plot to murder the whole town with weaponized mosquitoes. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo built a live-action cartoon and committed to it without blinking.
Barb and Star are best friends in Soft Rock, Nebraska. They sell furniture, eat dinner together, and narrate their lives to each other in the same flat Midwestern cadence. When their friend group casts them out for being dull, they book a trip to Vista Del Mar, Florida. There they stumble into a plot by a pale supervillain to kill the entire town with weaponized mosquitoes. The film is a comedy about middle-aged female friendship dressed up as a Bond spoof. Wiig and Mumolo build everything around two women who have never done anything reckless and decide to start.
Annie Mumolo plays Barb as the cautious half, anxious and rule-bound until the trip pries her open. Kristen Wiig plays Star as the bolder one, the friend who flirts and lies and chases the henchman across the resort. Wiig also plays the villain Sharon Gordon Fisherman in white pancake makeup and a black bob, hissing orders from a hidden lair. Jamie Dornan plays Edgar Pagét, the henchman who pines for his boss and falls for Star instead. Dornan throws himself into a beachside musical number about seagulls with total sincerity and steals the film. Damon Wayans Jr. plays Darlie Bunkle as a spy who cannot keep his own cover straight.
Josh Greenbaum directs the screenplay by Wiig and Mumolo with a flat, sunny visual style that treats every absurdity as ordinary. Steve Saklad’s production design builds a candy-colored resort of pastel hotels, tropical prints, and a glowing underground lair. The look insists that a talking crab and a synchronized hotel dance number belong in the same movie. The songs arrive as full production numbers rather than throwaway gags, and Dornan’s beach ballad is staged like an actual music video. The script stacks non sequiturs and invented names on top of each other until the sheer density becomes the joke. Nothing in the frame winks at the audience.
This is a film with one mode and it runs at full volume from the opening scene. The jokes work when the commitment is total and stall when a single bit runs too long. Wiig and Mumolo wrote two characters they clearly adore, and the affection between Barb and Star carries the stretches where the plot spins in place. The Bond-villain machinery exists only to give two Midwestern women a reason to leave home. The movie knows its premise is thin and fills it with sincerity instead of stakes. It is a sustained act of silliness made by people who refuse to apologize for it.