A number of interesting movies dropped onto different streaming services this past weekend. Now, I don’t have nor plan on getting Apple TV+ anytime soon, so Tom Hanks’s Greyhound is not something I’ll be seeing any time soon, and I watched and reviewed Netflix’s The Old Guard, and that one was pretty solid.
Of course, Hulu dropped the new Andy Samberg comedy Palms Springs, and I do have Hulu, so away we go.
Nyles (Samberg) is attending a destination wedding at a Palm Springs resort as the plus-one for his girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner), a self-centered and self-important bridesmaid to Tala (Camila Mendes). Tala’s older sister Sarah (Cristin Milioti) is maid-of-honor, but she doesn’t seem to want to be there. Hooking up with Nyles later, seeing Misty cheating on Nyles, and then heading off to have some fun in the desert, leads to a problem when Nyles is attacked by an angry man named Roy (the great J.K. Simmons). Nyles and Roy head off to a glowing cave, and against Nyles’s advice, Sarah follows and…things get really, really weird.
I’d seen the trailer for this one a couple times, but this one is one where the less you know, the better, so before I say any more…back out now if you don’t want to know. The trailer does give everything away, so if you missed that and prefer to go in cold, well, I warned ya.
Anyway, something about the cave puts the people that wander in into some kind of infinite time loop. As soon as the person falls asleep or otherwise loses consciousness, the day resets to the morning of the wedding, and Nyles has been living through this day for an unknown number of days, as had Roy, and now Sarah. Sarah, at least, isn’t blaming Nyles for everything and the two go start to spend their infinite days doing whatever they want to for as long as they can stay awake. There’s a real sense of comedic ennui here. Nothing matters, so why not give $100 to a kid selling candy bars to rob a wedding guest of his drugs? Even death isn’t really an obstacle. The day always resets itself.
Now, something like this, obviously, will have Sarah and Nyles fall in love with some complications, and even knowing the time loop twist, I did not see the romantic complications coming. However, the cast is full of fun characters played by engaging character actors like Simmons, June Squibb, and Dale Dickey. It’s just a fun movie that thinks its premise out in a more ironic way than Groundhog Day did.
Yeah, this was a good weekend for new stuff.
Grade: A-
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