I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a pair of performances—no, it’s really a singular, joint performance—like what we get from Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo in Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.
The title characters (Wiig is Star; Mumolo is Barb) are lifelong, middle-aged friends who impulsively disrupt their mundane, if content, Midwestern lives with a trip to a Florida beach resort. When we first meet them, sharing coffee on a display couch at the Jennifer Convertibles where they both work, director Josh Greenbaum and editor Steve Welch capture their enthusiastic, rapid-fire back-and-forth conversation in standard shot-reverse-shot form. It’s a bit of whiplash, given how quickly Barb and Star babble back and forth, but it’s really the only way to ease us into the conversational format most of the movie will take: these two women, in the same frame, agreeably talking in unison—in, over, through, and around each other—while a third person stands confused and dumbfounded before them, trying to keep up.
What Wiig and Mumolo are doing (it should be noted they co-wrote the screenplay) is really the inverse of Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on First?” routine, in which the comedy duo talked each other into knots while trying to name players on a baseball team. Rather than foster that sort of division and confusion between each other, Barb and Star’s parallel conversations turn on affirmation and a near-psychotic sense of agreement. Faster than finishing each other’s sentences, each woman starts agreeing with the other as soon as one of them opens their mouth. They’re best friends, after all, so of course they agree.
It’s a hilariously impressive bit of verbal gymnastics, but what makes Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar less like one of Wiig’s character-driven Saturday Night Live sketches and more like Bridesmaids, which Mumolo and Wiig also wrote and appeared in? Well, we also get an elaborate, extended plot about a criminal mastermind (also played by Wiig) planning a vengeful attack on Vista Del Mar with the help of a hunky henchman (Jamie Dornan) who is posing as a tourist at the resort. This allows for some ludicrous flights of fancy that are decidedly hit (Dornan, of the Fifty Shades series, is a delight in a high-kicking dance number) and miss (the villain’s anger is rooted in her albino-like skin condition; she also has an Asian hench-kid, played by Reyn Doi, named Yoyo). Those latter two gags probably aren’t the wisest of choices—as I’m sure the sage talking crab we also meet, named Morgan Freemond, would agree.
