Jon Lucas

Three men wake up in a wrecked Las Vegas suite with a tiger, a chicken, a baby and no groom, and none of them can remember how any of it got there. That is the whole of The Hangover (2009), and it remains the best idea Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have had: cut the stag night out, show the morning, and turn the search into a detective story in which every clue points at something the heroes did themselves. It is a writer's structure, and Todd Phillips had the sense to leave it alone. The film is fast and frequently funny. It is also careless with its women and lazy about its one Chinese character, and those faults belong to the script as much as to anyone.

Lucas and Moore have written as a pair since the 1990s, when both were assistants to the screenwriter Daniel Petrie Jr. There were uncredited rewrites, then Four Christmases (2008) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009), then the breakthrough, and after it a long run of films about groups behaving badly: the college birthday of 21 & Over (2013), the mothers of Bad Moms (2016) and A Bad Moms Christmas (2017), the friends of Spa Weekend (2026). From 21 & Over onward they have directed their own scripts as well, and the films since have been less well received.

The Hangover Part II (2011) is a useful test, because Lucas and Moore are credited for the characters and nothing more, and the new script has those men do the same thing again while the malice goes up. What the first film had and the second lacks is looseness, room for Zach Galifianakis to wander off the page. Lucas said in 2009 that "what's interesting when we write is how little time we spend talking about jokes", and in The Hangover that was a virtue, because the plotting carried the comedy on its own. In the later films it reads more like an explanation.

Spa Weekend sends Leslie Mann, Michelle Buteau, Anna Faris and Isla Fisher on a spa break and gives them wellness culture to knock about. The jokes are predictable, the sentiment unconvincing, and the four of them are repeatedly handed a situation where a line should be. We were not offended by it; we were bored, and the reason is plain on screen, which is that the friends are comic types placed in rooms and left to wait. Danny Ruhlmann's photography and Philip White's score cannot earn an affection the writing has not established. Moore and Lucas needed to be harder on their own pages before asking anyone else to help.

Their best film was directed by somebody else. That is not an insult, but it is worth bearing in mind the next time a comedy arrives with their names on it twice.