BARB AND STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR (15) ★★★★★
TIMING, apparently, is everything in comedy. So woolly hats off to the comic geniuses at Lionsgate Films for saving this sun-dappled silliness for a freezing weekend during lockdown.
Over the past year, I’ve heaped praise on hard-hitting documentaries and arty dramas. But secretly I’ve been pining for something big, brash and unashamedly daft.
And this hilarious James Bond-style spoof about two middle-aged best pals (played by Bridesmaids co-stars and co-writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo) got me in its opening scene.
I’m not entirely sure why watching a headphone-wearing paperboy lip-synching to Barbra Streisand left me so helpless but hats off again to whoever discovered Hawaiian child actor Reyn Doi who plays the villainous Yoyo (Doi pops up again at the end, busting some impressive moves in the dance-off which runs along the credits).
In the meantime, the culottes-clad duo are on holiday in Florida when they discover a nefarious plot to release a plague of killer mosquitoes during a beauty contest.
Wiig and Mumolo (themselves lifelong friends) form a very funny double act as the chatty duo, but they save their best writing for surreal diversions and bizarre musical interludes.
Jamie Dornan puts in his funniest performance since Fifty Shades Freed as Edgar, a reluctant terrorist who falls for both Wiig’s master criminal Sharon and her excitable tourist Star.
His inner conflict is expressed in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, a wonderfully cheesy montage sequence cut to an auto-tuned power ballad which boasts the most literal lyrics in musical history.
I also enjoyed Mark Jonathan
Davis’s inappropriate lounge singer Richard Cheese.
His “I Love Boobies” has been submitted for an Oscar but I’m still humming the jaunty melody of “Several Of My Friends From High School Have Recently Passed”.
We are living through hard times but sometimes you just have to laugh.
■ On digital now.