The Fabulous Four (2024)
Directed by: Jocelyn Moorhouse
Premise: Four elderly girlfriends (Susan Sarandon, Bette Midler, Megan Mullally, Sheryl Lee Ralph) converge in Key West when one of them plans to get married. The get-together brings up long simmering tensions between two of them.
What Works: The Fabulous Four is part of a niche of movies about older characters going on a trip such as 80 for Brady and Book Club: The Next Chapter and Last Vegas. The characters of these stories typically fill specific types and each of the central cast of The Fabulous Four has a clearly defined role. Susan Sarandon’s character is the responsible one whereas Bette Midler plays the impulsive and fun member of the clique and Sheryl Lee Ralph is the business minded friend who organizes the group. Megan Mullally is cast as the decadent friend and Mullally is consistently the funniest and sassiest member of the cast, getting most of the film’s best moments. Like other movies of its type, The Fabulous Four is intended to be lightweight fun and the filmmakers generally accomplish that. The film benefits from an R-rated sense of humor that spices up the otherwise bland material.
What Doesn’t: The crux of The Fabulous Four is the friendship between these women but that ends up being the weakest element of the story. Decades ago, Midler and Sarandon’s characters were best friends but one of them stole the other’s boyfriend and ultimately married him and Sarandon’s character never got over it. The man at issue has passed away and Midler’s character is marrying again. What’s at stake is the survival of the friend group but these women are not convincing as old friends. They don’t feel as though they share a history and there’s little drama in whether or not they find a way to forgive each other. These friend-group movies usually follow a pattern in which everyone is reunited, they break up, and then they reconcile. The storytelling mechanics of The Fabulous Four are obvious and forced. The conflicts don’t escalate to a crisis; the inevitable blow up happens not because the characters have gotten on each other’s last nerve but because the formula demands it. The Fabulous Four is also a wedding movie and it has elements of that genre, namely the bachelorette party and a dress shopping sequence but this is also perfunctory. The filmmakers don’t do anything with these scenarios. The age of these characters is a novelty but The Fabulous Four doesn’t address the women’s age in a way that is humorous or meaningful. The film also frequently looks and sounds terrible. There are musical numbers in which the sound is out of sync and the close-up shorts in the parasailing sequence were obviously shot on a stage.
Bottom Line: The Fabulous Four isn’t trying to be more than a potboiler but it’s a meager effort. This is filler and it may entertain its intended audience but everything about this production is mediocre.
Episode: #1007 (August 4, 2024)