"Spin Me Round" has its moments as a weirdo ensemble romp without much reward

Spin Me Round (2022)

If Adam Sandler and his buddies can shoot a movie during their vacation, so can writer-director Jeff Baena and his favorite circle of actors. With rompish travelogue “Spin Me Round,” it does ultimately feel like Baena wanted to go abroad and maybe make a movie around it. At its best, it’s a free-flowing hang-out lark with an embarrassment of casting riches. The central idea is also a clever nugget: a single-and-ready-to-mingle woman’s romance-novel expectations of an Italian getaway go sideways, and how! Unfortunately, Baena and his deep bench of funny, talented people—a reunion for the writer-director and his ensemble from 2017’s bawdy, irreverent convent-sex farce “The Little Hours”—put forth so much weirdo energy into material that wants to do it all but doesn’t really amount to much.

Alison Brie (who also co-wrote the script with Baena after “Horse Girl”) stars as Amber, a restaurant manager for a Tuscan Grove (think Olive Garden) in Bakersfield, California. She’s been there for nine years and now she’s ready to live. When her boss (Lil Rel Howery) chooses her for a special training program in the form of an all-expense paid trip to Italy, she jumps at the chance to recharge and maybe have an adventure or even fall in love like her own "Eat Pray Love." At the airport, Amber and two other participants—Deb (Molly Shannon), who whines about the airport losing her luggage, and bubbly Jen (Ayden Mayer)—are greeted by program manager Craig (Ben Sinclair). He collects their passports and takes them past the gorgeous villa they thought would be their lodgings. Instead, they're staying next door in a dismal motel where the bedroom doors don’t lock. The three women are then joined by other Tuscan Grove managers (Zach Woods, Tim Heidecker, Debby Ryan). Soon enough, Alison is singled out by the Tuscan Grove CEO, Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola), who’s even more handsome and charming in person. Escorted by Nick’s flirty, adventurous assistant Kat (Aubrey Plaza), Alison excuses herself from the group to enjoy a romantic afternoon on Nick’s yacht, followed by a soiree hosted by a rich friend (Fred Armisen). Everything is new and exciting before Amber suspects something shady is going on. When her relationship with Nick completely changes, other women in the program begin getting the wine-and-dine treatment by Nick, or are they just disappearing? What’s really happening? Who can Amber trust? 

“Spin Me Round” is all about subverting expectations, much like Amber’s increasing disillusionment of being out of the states for the first time. From the very start, Amber’s romantic dreams of ocean waves “From Here to Eternity”-style morph into her reality of the sludgy Alfredo sauce that gets squirted on the pasta she serves day in and day out. Pino Donaggio’s ethereal score, very reminiscent of his work in Brian De Palma’s “Body Double,” also adds to the dreamy, too-good-to-be-true mood. Spiraling from a hopeless romantic’s wish-fulfillment fantasy to a nightmarish yet light-footed conspiracy thriller, the film always keeps one foot on the grounded side of Amber, played with a sweetness and reactive charm by the endlessly appealing Alison Brie. While Baena and Brie’s script does follow through on Amber’s self-discovery, everything else around her feels almost too wacky and heightened for its own good. There are a lot of amusing ideas and non-sequiturs that keep starting and stopping the film’s momentum, but some of the broader improvisational bits tend to flail and come across as strained and self-indulgent.

The supporting characters are shticky, mostly one-note creations, but the performers are never less than committed. Molly Shannon has some hilarious moments as a very Molly Shannon character, the annoyingly clingy and bipolar Deb who has unstable fits and an over-the-top wardrobe change for every scene. A sexy, charismatic Alessandro Nivola plays daft and sleazy to chef’s-kiss perfection as lothario Nick, and though the film dumps her unceremoniously, Aubrey Plaza (who is married to the director) reliably adds spark and unpredictability as the ambiguous Kat. As the program’s chef, Lauren Weedman even has a very funny drunken dialogue about men not catcalling her anymore, but it’s her priceless delivery alone.

As a story, “Spin Me Round” is pretty scattershot and goes nowhere fast. It keeps spinning around every which way, getting only just a little bit weird, uncomfortable, absurd, sexy, and dark, but not really committing to anything that sticks. What is actually going on behind the scenes isn’t terribly shocking, despite several red herrings, but the bigger letdown is that the efforts are far less rewarding when we hear the lame punchline. However, watching this stacked ensemble find enough moments between the margins makes it a breezy beach-read diversion on occasion. You do wish you were having just as much fun as the cast probably had in making it.

Grade: C +

IFC Films is releasing “Spin Me Round” (104 min.) in theaters and on demand August 18, 2022.