Ibiza is ripe for some sort of excursion comedy: Mike Posner named a song after the crazy nonsense that happens there (RIP Avicii), and in Europe, it’s legendary for being the equivalent of the South Padre Island or Panama City in the US. Ibiza, the movie, tries to surround the crazy island with a crazy story about 3 women having crazy nights in Spain’s party capital. Like Ibiza the place, the movie has moments of elation surrounded by dead spots of awkwardness and boredom. Like Netflix probably wants, it’s great for a boring weekend early evening with nothing better to do.
Harper (Gillian Jacobs) has been toiling away at a job she hates with an OCD boss, Sarah (Michaela Watkins). Sarah decides Harper is ready for a Business trip to Barcelona to land a prospective client. Harper’s friends Leah (Phoebe Robinson) and Nikki (Vanessa Bayer) invite themselves, excited to turn Harper’s trip from lame to ratchet. On their first night out clubbing, Harper runs into DJ Leo West (Richard Madden), where they find a genuine connection in one another. Leo’s next gig is in Ibiza, where Harper and the gang decide to go for the night, so they can get back on a plane and arrive in Barcelona the next morning an hour before the big business meeting. Totally foolproof plan! What could go wrong?
Ibiza is a comedy, produced by Adam McKay’s company. So is this movie funny? Pieces of it are. The writer of this movie (a woman!) got her breaks by writing tons of shorts, and you can feel that type of writing in the plot. The characters are put in vignette type situations and hopefully the movie mines comedy from it. The best scene is probably at a creepy party at a Spanish Mansion that only a rich person would have. That one puts the 3 female leads in really funny situations involving sushi, ellipticals, and hot tubs. The audience hops from the beach to a party to a plane ride to a taxi to a nightclub with little scenes all loosely pieced together to a relatively cohesive narrative for a comedy. In general, it’s more fun than not when the 3 girls are hanging out with each other, especially when a British football team shows up and gives them more people to shoot the breeze with. They really seem like good friends, and are genuinely interested in each other’s success, plus their dialogue will create more grins than eyerolls. Plus the third act goes in a very different direction than the otherwise predictable story suggests in a good way.
Because the creative team made their bones creating shorts, it’s clear to me that they framed out general scenes they wanted, and hoped the actors’ charisma or ludicrous situation would carry the day when they couldn’t think of something great. As such, many of the scenes in Ibiza are funny more in theory than execution. Crazy Spanish girl driving to Ibiza sounds funny, but the ideas they come up with in the scene only really succeed in being scary and diverting, for example. When the comedy ebbs and flows like that, logic flaws in the script become more aggravating, like characters not using cell phones for no reason or stealing clients after you betray their trust inexplicably. There’s also a real problem here of the Bechdel Test. So, there are 3 basic rules of the Bechdel Test: 1) There are named female characters. 2) The women talk to each other. No problems so far right? But here’s the biggest failing: 3) They talk about something other than a man. Harper’s entire quest here, until the third act, is to sleep with Leo West, and Leah and Nikki also just talk about sexual exploration with men themselves. The more I kept watching, the more I would get frustrated: here you have 3 talented women going to Europe, some it’s even said for the first time! At least make one of them into history, or art, or FASHION for goodness sake! The third act tries to rectify this scenario by making the story about what it wasn’t about for 2/3 of the runtime for which I was saying Finally!, when I should have been saying “Awesome trip!”
Netflix continues it’s streak of B- moviemaking with Ibiza. It’s something you’ll watch in the moment, be fine with, and then forget as you move onto the newest thing they’ve put out for you. I watched this movie 2 days ago and I already forgot that the movie started in Barcelona. How cruel to neglect one of the 5-10 best cities in the world like that!