With the bachelorette weekend fun in Key West, “The Fabulous Four” stars fittingly aged four friends played by legends Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally.
Widow Marilyn (Midler) is about to say I do to a stranger she met in the DMV. But first, this widow prepares to wrap her sexy dancing legs around some muscular stranger. In the past year and a half, this type of star studded girls’ adventure movie has grown into its own sub genre of sorts (see also: “80 for Brady,” “Summer Camp,” and “Book Club: The Next Chapter”). The film has confused Americans in a way they have not been since the War. Director Jocelyn Moorhouse and writers Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly have written a film that is certainly not gritty and absurd. The silliest, most sexually explicit of all: “Fifty Shades Of Grey”. “Fabulous Four” is sloppily put together but presented with energy so it’s likable, even great cinema in its own right. It does feel like “Fabulous Four” was shot after downing three bottles of champagne. That’s how a person should watch it anyway.
The main source of tension in this tale is that Marilyn, a vacuous TikTok influencer, and Lou (Sarandon), her estranged best friend who considers the wedding of Marilyn to be her greatest betrayal. Lou feels that Marilyn transformed her into a bitter and sad spinster who is obsessed with and lives with nothing but cats and of course, she’s had enough of being bamboozled into a vacation just so she can be shown off a ‘six toed’ cat that Hemingway used to keep as a pet, roaming around his Florida home. (Sarandon’s saucer eyes light up endearingly as she clutches a pet carrier to her chest.)
Completing the quartet is Kitty (Ralph), a weed grower with a converted daughter (Brandee Evans) who would like to put her in a old age home for religious people (“Heaven’s Gate?” Kitty grumbles, “More like hell on earth”), and Alice (Mullally), an adoring and lustyfied vocalist who draws much of her fame from crossing the contours of this story and who is eager to throw out many jaw droppingly ridiculous punchlines.
The jokes in this case will have you wondering how far you can cross your boundaries in terms of giggling with your mother in law during a matinee. Surprisingly to Lou, who happens to meet a love interest played by Bruce Greenwood, the script does not feel the need to crack a joke about a guy who happens to be holding one of Key West’s famed wild chickens. There is a bit too much of a dependence on some inane slapstick. Bette Midler slaps her shoes so high in the air that they literally leave the screen and later on she is twerking, which is not bad at all. More incredible is that she along with her other professional colleagues strive really hard to inject at least one dimension to their caricatures. Midler is comfortable allowing her narcissist the vulnerability of her persona while Sarandon, who is quite constituently asked to bear an angry visage, manages to charm us every time she loosens the little confuse. (In one scene she’s high on edibles and imagines a cat giving a heart transplant.)
Moorhouse is, after all, a pro; among other she has worked on a few pictures about women misbehaving like “Muriel’s Wedding” (she was the producer) or “The Dressmaker” (her directorial debut, a must for Sarah Snook fans).
After all, this is messier and a little more personal compared to her older works, however, one can only obsess at the performances, and for this, one is willing to sit through the imperfections, the tacky green screen in the parasailing scene, the abrupt transition from the highpoints to the next morning, and even the misplacement of the final musical number which is most of the reasons why the spectators sense an urgency to rush out of the cinema before the headache strikes.
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