Time-loop rom-com is mostly funny
★★¼5 Rated R. 87 minutes. On Hulu.
We’re going to reach a point where, really, it’s enough with the time-loop movies already.
“Palm Springs” — a mostly fun time-loop rom-com with an enjoyable dark streak that’s bowing on Hulu — suggests we’re not there yet.
Like 1993’s beloved “Groundhog Day,” 2014’s excellent “Edge of Tomorrow,” and 2017’s fun “Happy Death Day,” “Palm Springs” gets its narrative kicks by having the same day occur repeatedly with similar but ultimately different goings on.
Directed by Max Barbakow and penned by Andy Siara, “Palm Springs” stars Andy Samberg as a guest at a wedding in Palm Springs, Calif., who’s long been stuck in a loop and Christin Milioti as the maid of honor, who, eventually, gets trapped in it with him.
We meet Samberg’s Nyles as he wakes in the morning, becomes interested in the bare leg of his girlfriend, Misty (Meredith Hagner), and has relations with her, which are then followed by an awkward conversation that barely seems to mean anything to him.
He floats in the pool for a while, getting drunk on beers, and later sits at the open-air wedding reception very underdressed for the occasion.
Milioti’s Sarah, meanwhile, is pushing the bartender for a more-generous pour from a bottle of red.
“Come on, throw me a bone,” Sarah says. “This isn’t the day for moderation.”
“It’s not … good wine,” she is told.
“I don’t care.”
Despite being the bride’s sister and, again, the maid of honor, constant-disappointment-toher-family Sarah has no idea she would be expected to make a speech. Jumping to the rescue is Nyles, who bolts onto the stage and gives a freewheeling, optimistic speech that goes over pretty well.
Misty is very confused; Sarah is at least a little intrigued.
Nyles then captures Sarah’s attention with a series of maneuvers on the dance floors that
suggest he almost knows the coming movements of every other guest, including a man who passes out.
After more alcohol for both of them, Nyles convinces Sarah to go somewhere with him. We next find them outside the window to a room in which Misty is cheating on Nyles.
“Why don’t you go in there and stop them?” Sarah asks.
“Trust me,” he assures her, “there is not a world where these two don’t end up together.”
This type of talk from Nyles will begin to make more sense to Sarah the next morning when she wakes after a night with him that involves even more boozing and a very careless mistake on his part. Like him, she awakens to find it is, again, the morning of the wedding day.
Angry, she goes to find him in his room, laying into him in front of a confused Misty.
Soon, Nyles does his best to explain the situation to Sarah, and you begin to get some sense as to how long he’s been stuck in this loop.
She (and you) also will come to understand why a man named Roy (J.K. Simmons) had attacked Nyles — with arrows, no less — on the boozy, fatefilled night.
When Sarah finally accepts what has happened, she goes about enjoying an irreverentand-repetitive existence that’s very Nyles-centric. And, of course, the two grow close.
Eventually, though, Sarah becomes determined to find a way out of the loop. It is a goal Nyles does not share.
Samberg, a veteran of “Saturday Night Live” who has spent the last several years starring on the constantly delightful sitcom “Brooklyn 99” and who’s a producer of “Palm Springs,” brings his enjoyably zany sensibilities to Nyles. He manages to elevate many of the sophomoric gags to at least near-laugh-outloud status.
It’s nice to see a significant role for always-interesting Milioti, who’s had memorable appearances in everything from
“How I Met Your Mother” to “Black Mirror” to “Mythic Quest.” She helps make Sarah easy to relate with and to root for, if perhaps not initially.
And, in only a handful of scenes, Academy Award winner Simmons (“Whiplash”) helps elevate “Palm Springs.”
Behind the camera, Barbakow and Siara — who previously collaborated on an award-winning, dark-comedy short film, “The Duke,” do solid work but allow “Palm Springs” to lose a bit of steam over its relatively short running time. Still, you’ll laugh more often than you won’t.
Most important, the filmmakers use the hook of the timeloop to do some clever, creative things they could not do were this just some linear movie set at a Palm Springs wedding.
As it stands, “Palm Springs” is more than a little loopy, but we’re a bit better off for it.