Santiago Segura
Félix
Overview
When two friends lose their jobs and find gigs as children's entertainers at a luxury hotel, they sneak in their kids to give them a summer vacation.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
6 min readA Summer of Lies, Laughs, and Low Stakes
I’ll admit it: I went into Summer Vacation expecting a train wreck. Not because of Santiago Segura’s reputation—though his Torrente films are a divisive mix of raunchy humor and broad slapstick—but because the premise sounded like a recipe for exhaustion. Two unemployed friends, Félix (Segura) and Óscar (Leo Harlem), bluff their way into jobs as children’s entertainers at a luxury hotel, smuggling their own kids along for the ride.
It’s the kind of setup that could either be a chaotic delight or a 100-minute slog of cringe and repetition. Spoiler: it’s both, but not in the ways I expected.
Segura has spent decades mining comedy from the absurd, and here, he leans into the kind of humor that feels like it was written on a napkin between takes. The film’s opening act is a masterclass in escalating lies—Félix and Óscar’s initial deception spirals into a web of half-truths, each more ridiculous than the last. There’s a certain charm in watching them dig their own graves with such enthusiasm.
The problem? The film never really climbs out of that hole. What starts as a promising farce devolves into a series of repetitive gags, as if Segura and his co-writers (including Marta González de Vega) ran out of steam halfway through and decided to just keep the engine running on fumes.
The Segura Effect
Segura’s presence looms large over Summer Vacation, both as its director and its lead. He’s a performer who thrives on physical comedy, and his Félix is a walking disaster—equal parts lovable and insufferable. There’s a moment early on where he attempts to teach a group of kids a dance routine, his limbs flailing in every direction like a malfunctioning marionette. It’s the kind of scene that could’ve been painful to watch, but Segura’s commitment to the bit sells it. He’s not just playing for laughs; he’s playing for chaos, and the film’s best moments come when he fully embraces that energy.
His real-life daughter, Sirena Segura, appears as one of the smuggled kids, and while her role is small, it’s hard not to read it as a meta-commentary on Segura’s own career. Here’s a man who built his brand on over-the-top humor, now sharing the screen with his child in a film about parental deception. It’s either deeply personal or just a convenient casting choice—either way, it adds a layer of intrigue to an otherwise straightforward comedy.
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsIndiana Jones won opening weekend. Segura still filled the hotel.
Sony Pictures Entertainment Iberia opened Vacaciones de verano in Spanish theatres on 6 July 2023. The first weekend took about 1.08 million euros, second behind Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Taquilla Espana later logged 7,417,895 euros and 1,245,629 admissions for the full run. Diario de Navarra, citing Sony on 3 August, already had the film past one million spectators and called it the Spanish title to beat that summer. Javier Fesser's Campeonex eventually passed it as 2023's top Spanish film. The chatter in the trade was not whether families would show up. latestnetflix.com's read is that it was whether Segura's all-ages comedies still owned July.
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Tenerife as a set, and a daughter on the kids' call sheet.
Segura directed and plays Felix. Leo Harlem is Oscar. They are divorced fathers who lose their jobs, take temporary gigs as children's entertainers at a luxury hotel, and hide their own children in the staff area. Marta Gonzalez de Vega, from Tenerife, co-wrote with Segura. The pair already had Padre no hay mas que uno and A todo tren as Spanish hits. El Dia reported a late 2022 shoot of several weeks on the island, with Siam Park readable in the trailer, plus Tenerife North Airport, southern hotels, and the whale-watching boat Ragnarok. The children on camera include Sirena Segura, Javier Garcia, Hugo Simon Blanco, and Daniela Pintado. Patricia Conde and Cristina Gallego complete the adult circus. Nena Daconte and Carlos Jean reworked Formula V's song of the same title for 2023. Bowfinger International Pictures and Chapuzas Audiovisuales AIE produced, with Netflix and Atresmedia participating and Mogambo in association. Wikipedia also lists Maria Luisa Gutierrez as a producer. ,
Cinemania's Ruben Romero Santos scored it 3 out of 5 and called it Segura's most successful film in a long time. Fotogramas' Fausto Fernandez scored it 4 out of 5 and treated it as the roundest of Segura's all-audience period. Netflix lists Summer Vacation as a 2023 TV-PG kids and family comedy, title 81611183, with Spanish original audio and English subtitles. Runtime sits around 100 minutes. IMDb files the Spain date as 6 July 2023. The rumor that this was a private home movie with a famous surname on the poster does not match the receipts. Sony sold a package holiday. The island supplied the water park. , , 
What the live copy skipped.
The completed gossip on this title treated Sirena's appearance as a mysterious debut and shrugged that Rotten Tomatoes had no score. Canary press and the box-office tables already had the production facts. Segura has been putting family comedies into Spanish multiplexes since Padre no hay mas que uno in 2019. Summer Vacation is that line of work with a hotel staff corridor instead of a chaotic household. Netflix's participation on the finance side, then a later streaming listing, is the usual Spanish comedy path, not a prestige drop. Anyone hunting a feud will leave empty-handed. The story is a director who keeps his daughter, his co-writer, and a water park in the same frame, then still comes in behind Indiana Jones for one weekend and still clears a million tickets. A second Spanish film beating him by year's end is the only real bruise, and even that is a box-office fact, not a set fight. ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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