Some kids spend their birthday vacation relaxing. Summer spends hers running a covert breakup operation. That is the comic engine of Summer’s Last Resort, the new Tubi comedy fronted by Violet McGraw, and the streamer’s first trailer makes clear that McGraw’s character has appointed herself the lone voice of reason in a family that did not ask for one. The film premieres July 3, exclusively on Tubi.
McGraw plays Summer, a teenager wound tight enough to narrate her own life through affirmations. The trailer finds her poolside with her earbuds in, calmly insisting that she embraces all uncertainty. The footage has other plans. It cuts to her behind the wheel of a car during a driving lesson, plowing across a packed school commons and nearly flattening the mascot while the instructor, Vice Principal Glenn Winters, holds on for dear life. Glenn, played by Jerry O’Connell, is about to become a much bigger problem in Summer’s life than a failed parallel park.
That is because Glenn and Summer’s mother, Milly, played by Sophia Bush, hit it off not long after the driving disaster. An awkward run-in turns into a romance, and Milly, ever the free spirit, decides the natural next step is to bring her new boyfriend along on the family’s Caribbean resort trip. Summer, who has already filed the relationship under doomed, is appalled. Standing beside her younger brother Grayson, played by Dawian Van Der Westhuizen, she lays out her case against the match with the confidence of a girl who has thought about this far too much. Her mom, she explains, is tequila. Glenn is lukewarm chamomile. The pairing, in her expert assessment, makes no sense.
So she sets out to end it, and the vacation goes sideways fast. The trailer stacks up one calamity after another, from inflatable bubble-ball collisions to a string of sabotage schemes that keep blowing back on her, plus a poolside crisis that somehow requires performing CPR on a dolphin. Summer’s campaign to rescue her mother from what she has decided is another doomed romance turns a luxury getaway into a slow-motion pileup, complete with an attempt to set Milly up with a different man and a stunt that ends with Glenn hurtling down a water slide he very much did not want to ride. There are spit takes, small fires, the occasional thrown punch, and a running supply of vacation chaos. When Milly mentions she is trying out commitment, Summer’s review is a single flat word. Later, Milly takes stock of the whole ordeal and admits it is the strangest vacation she has ever been on.
The film is directed by Melanie Scrofano and comes from the team behind Ginny & Georgia, blending family comedy, vacation mishaps, and a coming-of-age streak. But the trailer keeps circling back to McGraw, who holds the center of the chaos with a deadpan that does a lot of the comic lifting. Summer’s Last Resort premieres July 3, streaming exclusively on Tubi.
