BEFORE: Michaela Watkins carries over from "Person to Person". Whatever happens in this film, at least I get to clear it off my Netflix list - that's some form of progress, at least. It's been on my watchlist for a while, I know I couldn't link to it last February, but I'm trying clean up all the films left over from Februarys past, I think this is one of them. And with a running time of just over 90 minutes, it won't take up too much of my time on a Thursday night/Friday morning.
THE PLOT: A young American woman and her two best friends seek out a hot DJ in Spain.
AFTER: Well, I don't know how your February is going so far, but mine's not off to a great start - I keep thinking I'm going to find a great romance film and so far this month's been a bust. The awkwardness of "Licorice Pizza" and the non-romance plotlines of "Person to Person" has now been followed by a whole bunch of stupid in "Ibiza". If tracking down a DJ in Spain counts as romance these days, then maybe romance is dead. I'd say that maybe the pandemic killed romance as we know it, but this film was released in 2018, pre-COVID - although in the first scene, Harper's boss is wearing a face-mask so she doesn't get sick. I guess she was ahead of her time by about two years - really, we should have been wearing masks all along, especially during flu season, right?
Ugh, the millennials are the WORST, right? Like, how is DJ still a valid job? How was that a job to begin with - when I was growing up DJs worked for radio stations and they spoke for a bit in between songs on LITE-FM and also maybe gave you the time and temperature and threw to the traffic guy during rush hours. The kids today think that being a DJ is close to being a rock star, they get up in front of hundreds of people in a club and mix records together, but I'm thinking that a chimp could probably do that just as well, so I don't get it. But I'm old. These kids also think that being an "influencer" is also some kind of job, but I think that's just an excuse to be online posting on social media all day long.
Harper works for a PR firm, which is almost as bad as being an influencer - her nasty boss who's always yelling at her sends her to Barcelona, though, to land a new client. While to some this would seem like an opportunity to finally prove her worth to the company, Harper instead treats this like a company-paid vacation and invites her two best friends along. Umm, this is not how a business trip is supposed to work, you'd think the screenwriter would know this. (NITPICK POINT: Who paid for the friends' tickets? Certainly not the company...am I the only one asking?)
Once in Barcelona, the three friends immediately start ignoring the boss's calls and texts and head out to a nightclub. Sure, what could POSSIBLY go wrong? This is where Harper meets the DJ, Leo West, and he helps her out by removing a vulgar image that someone has drawn on Harper's cheek in glow-in-the-dark paint. Harper's pretty stupid for letting a guy draw on her face in the first place, but don't worry, she's going to get a lot stupider before the end.
The three friends get invited to a party by a shady man, who insures them that the DJ will be at his house later. They believe him, so basically they're all pretty dumb. Harper's friend Leah starts fooling around with a married man and gets threatened by the wife with a knife, and Nikki takes a bunch of drugs after being told they're ADHD medications, and even if they were, which they probably weren't, that's not a great idea. I don't get it, this film basically took every opportunity to depict young American women as oversexed, gullible sluts, and what kind of message does this send out to the young women watching at home? It's supposed to be a comedy, or is it? Maybe this is supposed to be a training film, telling young girls how not to act when they're adults? I think that's giving the movie too much credit, it's just plain stupid.
Despite their missteps and bad decisions, they keep failing upwards, though - Harper gets the phone number of the DJ, and when the trio learns that he's flying to Ibiza for his next gig, they just have to follow him there. Sure, who cares about the business meeting, which was the whole reason for the trip in the first place? I'm sure it will be fine, they'll be back in time, unless they party too much and have sex and then oversleep the next day...well, guess what. So, you had your fling with the DJ, was it worth it? It was, but my point is that it shouldn't have been - you can find another DJ, but it could be a bit harder to find another job.
I'm going to be kind with my rating, because this is the first sign of something akin to romance, at least between Harper and Leo. The other two girls just act like pure id, they're only motivated by sex, but since they're also depicted as rather stupid and foolish the rest of the time, how am I supposed to take them seriously as strong female characters? And doesn't Vanessa Bayer ever get tired of playing idiots? I guess not, if that's her bread and butter.
But the worst thing about this film is probably the dialogue. EVERY time somebody says something the next line is "Wait, did I just say that out loud? I probably shouldn't say that. But what I meant to say was THIS, I just wasn't sure what you would think of me if I said THAT, though." Ugh, every conversation is like this, and it's extremely ponderous, plus people just don't talk like this all the time, or if they do, they're very annoying. And stupid.
I'm not even sure if the title of this film is just "Ibiza" or as Netflix lists it, "Ibiza: Love Drunk". My guess is that they tried to market the film with just the title of the island, and nobody in the younger generation knew what that was, so they had to add more words to the title so the kids would understand what it was about and maybe go see it. There's a lawsuit pending from the island of Ibiza because the film was shot in Croatia, and also because it depicts the island in such a negative light, namely that it's full of stupid American women partying and getting drunk and taking drugs and acting irresponsibly by missing their business meetings. Yeah, I'm with the island on this one, I hope they win their lawsuit.
Wait, wait, I almost forgot today's "Love Tip" - umm, never let anybody draw on your face? I'd say "Maybe don't party the night before your business meeting" but that's a career tip, not a love tip.
Also starring Gillian Jacobs (last seen in "The Contractor"), Vanessa Bayer (last seen in "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar"), Phoebe Robinson (last seen in "Becoming"), Richard Madden (last seen in "Eternals"), Félix Gómez, Jordi Molla (last seen in "Term Life"), Augustus Prew (last seen in "About a Boy"), Anthony Welsh (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Humphrey Ker (last heard in "Missing Link"), Miguel Angel Silvestre (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Marina Salas, Nelson Dante, Anjela Nedyalkova (last seen in "T2 Trainspotting"), Albert Suárez, Alex Hernandez, Jose Luis García-Pérez, Lolo Herrero (last seen in "The Cold Light of Day"), Michelle Noh, Bojan Ban.
RATING: 5 out of 10 pieces of sushi served on a naked woman (Do people still do this? How very un-PC...)
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