Movie Review: 'Spin Me Round' Fails Aubrey Plaza and Allison Brie

Spin Me Round is a bizarre movie. The comedy starring the lovely Allison Brie and the brilliant Aubrey Plaza has a ridiculous amount of promise and falls short. The idea behind the narrative is a good one, and with Brie and Plaza, along with supporting ringers such as Tim Heidecker and Molly Shannon, Spin Me Round should have been a no-brainer indie comedy sensation. Instead, director Jeff Baena throws in one twist too many and leaves one MAJOR plot thread dangling, leaving Spin Me Round to spin its wheels.

Spin Me Round tells the story of Amber (Allison Brie). Amber has been the manager of an Italian themed chain restaurant for most of her working life. She did try to leave and start her own restaurant but it didn’t work out. Thankfully, her old boss, played in a completely wasted cameo by Lil Rel Howery, brought her back and she seems content to work there for the foreseeable future.

In appreciation of her hard work, the boss nominated Amber to go on a manager’s trip to Italy, the headquarters of the restaurant chain and the home of the chain owner, a billionaire playboy weirdo named Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola). Amber along with several other managers from across the country will be on the trip and each is led to believe they will be staying in an Italian villa and mingling with the incredible Italian culture. The reality is quite different.

Instead, Amber along with fellow managers played by Molly Shannon, Debby Ryan, Zach Wood, Tricia Helfer and Tim Heidecker, are staying in a cheap motel and their training consists of a couple of modest cooking lessons and a deeply misguided showing of Life is Beautiful for some reason. Oh, their handler for the trip has taken everyone’s passport, meaning no one can leave with his permission.

The weirdness doesn’t stop there as Nick Martucci takes a liking to Amber and has his assistant, Kat (Aubrey Plaza), pull her out of training for a private meeting on his yacht. This meeting is both as creepy and unethical as you can imagine. And, what happens from there constitutes what remains of the story of Spin Me Round, a combination of comedy, dark comedy, romantic comedy and for a brief period of time, a horror movie.

There is a lot to like about Spin Me Round, that cast is absolutely stacked, as you can tell. Sadly, it’s just too all over the place. From act one to act two the tone shifts from a satire of tacky chain restaurants to a bizarre romantic comedy and then the third act brings an element of conspiracy movie and horror. All of it is professionally crafted but, the whiplash from one act to the next is overwhelming. I get what the movie was going for and other movies have pulled off the genre flipping conceit, but Spin Me Round just doesn’t quite nail it.

The tonal shifts are just too jarring. But that’s not the worst thing about Spin Me Round. Rather, the worst thing about Spin Me Round is how the movie wasted the utterly brilliant Aubrey Plaza. Plaza is at the center of all of the best moments of Spin Me Round. Her chemistry with Allison Brie is off the charts awesome and where their plot goes is surprising, exciting and funny. Then, Plaza is just gone. One little plot twist and her absence is explained in a single, deeply unsatisfying, line of dialogue.

As the last act of Spin Me Round played out I kept searching for Plaza and a resolution to her unresolved plot with Brie’s Amber and that resolution never came. It’s such a waste because, as I said, Brie and Plaza are ridiculously great together. They are an absolute blast in a scene where Kat takes Amber on a secret tour of late night Italy and where they are headed is the most interesting plot, among the many plots of Spin Me Round.

That the movie ends with Amber sharing a scene with the entirely wrong character in the movie is an absolute crime. It’s a crime so bad that I can’t even recommend the movie. Spin Me Round is just far too unsatisfying. Don’t give me a brilliant Aubrey Plaza plot and then take it away without a proper ending! Give me my ending, give me my Aubrey Plaza. She’s so amazing, she’s the best thing in the movie. How do you not use her at the end???

This isn’t me having a crush on Aubrey Plaza, the entire internet has a crush on Aubrey Plaza. This is a legitimate critique of Spin Me Round. The film simply doesn’t resolve the best part of the movie. Making a character important to the plot and abandoning that character without resolution is a flaw. When that character is played by Aubrey Plaza, it’s a crime not to finish it. Spin Me Round arrives in AMC Movie Theaters and for Digital On-Demand Rental on August 19th, 2022.

Find my archive of more than 20 years of movie reviews at SeanattheMovies.Blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter @podcastsean for my newest reviews and @seanatthemovies for my archive reviews posted daily. You can also listen to me to talk about Aubrey Plaza movies, I mean movies in general, on the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast on your favorite podcast app.