Like Las Vegas or Amsterdam, Ibiza is the sort of place that evokes nothing but expressions of either extreme reverie or regret. Except, unlike the former two cities, Ibiza is an entire island of sin, its pulse–flowing with the blood of iniquity–punctuated by the beats of EDM for the added assurance that all your peccadilloes are perfectly on the level–how could they not be with such pretty lights and pleasant music?
In comparison the harsh grind of New York, the danceable tranquility of Ibiza is more than a welcome change for Harper (Gillian Jacobs, a Netflix darling, of sorts, after her stint as Mickey on Love), whose current interactions with the city are not exactly “freeing,” as indicated by the the Will Ferrell-produced (through his company, Gary Sanchez Productions) film opening with a woman (Gwen Elizabeth Duchon) dressed as one of those stoic Statue of Liberty ladies trying to get tips for their life-like inanimateness. Looking around her to see that no one gives a fuck about her struggle–as they’re all dealing with their own–the Statue of Liberty finally rolls her eyes, says “Fuck it” and lights a cigarette. On the train ride home, Harper’s countenance is punctuated by annoyance, built upon by the close proximity of another male passenger next to her invading her already minimal space. All the while, Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” ironically plays in the background to heighten the viewer’s sense of just how much Harper is in need of a reprieve.
Mercifully, it comes from her terror of a boss, Sarah (Michaela Watkins, serving Mary Steenburgen vibes), who abruptly tells her she’s going on a business trip to Barcelona for the purpose of vetting a potential client with a sangria brand that will presumably help increase the company’s cachet by increasing their international net (though it’s, of course, unclear what type of company, exactly, it is, loosely pertaining to advertising one imagines). Upon telling her two best friends, Nikki (Vanessa Bayer) and Leah (Phoebe Robinson), about the unexpected news, they immediately insert themselves into the “vacation,” Nikki conveniently able to get time off from the dentist’s office where she works thanks to the beauty of blackmail she has on her boss and Leah able to do the same simply because she’s “freelance.” After all, when it comes to the Netflix-created film, there is no plot device too thin to explain away how things come to pass.
So with that, the trio is off to Barcelona, where the requisite hotel joke about all the residual jizz lying around is made, and later expounded upon when Harper leaves to go on her first meeting with a rep for the brand and Leah and Nikki just so happen to have a blacklight app to reveal that there literally is jizz everywhere. For gross-out humor is the mark of any movie with Will Ferrell’s stamp of approval on it. Later, when Harper meets up with her friends at the beach with Diego (Félix Gómez), the aforementioned rep, in tow, an attraction between him and Nikki (sunburnt to the point of red face and all) magically materializes and he invites them out to “the club” that night–the use of the term being repeated in that generic way almost as though to reiterate the genericness of the movie itself.
That evening, of course, Harper, who apparently hasn’t had sex in roughly a year, encounters that increasingly rare event: feeling a spark with someone. Modeled after Avicii in seemingly every way (including the dichotomy of his true personality being at war with the international celebrity DJ persona he must adopt during every set), Leo West (Richard Madden) finds himself inexplicably drawn to Harper after noticing that she has a neon dick drawn on her face from his perch behind the soundboards. It’s the most believable “modern” meet-cute screenwriter Lauryn Kahn could come up with, and we as the audience can go along with it, one supposes, because it’s Ibiza (even though much of the film was shot in Croatia), and, you know, sexual magnetism happens.
After wiping the dick off her face backstage, Leo gives Harper his number and tells her to call. Through a series of hijinks, she, of course, can’t connect with him again that night when the timing is right. That’s when Leah tells her he’s performing in Ibiza the following evening and that it’s destiny (as if DJs aren’t always playing in Ibiza). And even though the most important part of her business-related endeavor is the following day as well, Harper chooses the potential for dick over work success (it’s what most women would do).
And off they go to the island, taking a plane filled with Englishmen (Ibiza is just one of many locales the British have taken a shine to colonizing) who encourage Harper’s romantic gamble in uncharacteristic British fashion. As it becomes a race to get to Flow, the club where Leo is playing, before he takes the stage, the girls encounter a cab driver who takes them to his house before offering to chauffeur them in a limo he also just happens to have so they won’t be rejected from getting in. And, because it’s a limo, the obligatory scene of all three popping out of the sunroof occurs, with Harper declaring that she doesn’t care how cliche she is being, which is, of course, is Kahn’s way of subtly apologizing for her often lazy storytelling. For good measure on the genre of humor that Ibiza is intended to represent, Nikki gets shit on by a bird despite the fact that it’s nighttime and birds don’t generally fuck with that time of day.
Rounding out the list of expected scenes (in addition to Harper wearing a unicorn hoodie) is a hot tub at Leo’s hotel where the two consummate their brief whirlwind of a relationship. And, as many who have come to Ibiza before her, Harper’s propensity for getting swept up by the night causes her to miss her flight back to Barcelona for her very important business meeting the next day, offering Bayer another chance to play up her Saturday Night Live stylings.
While Ibiza manages to rein in the prosaicisms long enough to offer an ending that doesn’t directly tell us that Leo and Harper’s relationship will persist, its overall reliance on every single trope “demanded” of the girls’ trip mixed with rom-com genre is already too unforgivable for the conclusion to make amends.
Still, for all the triteness, the one territory Ibiza wouldn’t tread on was use of Mike Posner’s “I Took A Pill in Ibiza,” which would have felt all too appropriate in its predictability as the song to play during the credits.
