‘The Fabulous Four’ Review: An Incoherent Girls-Trip Comedy in the Vein of ’80 for Brady’
A huge misfortune befalls “The Fabulous Four” right out of the gate: its resemblance to the delightful and far superior “80 For Brady,” the 2023 comedy in which four aging women reclaim their youth and friendship on a Super Bowl misadventure. “The Fabulous Four” is by no means a knock-off — both films had been written before cameras had rolled on either one — but their similarities make “The Fabulous Four” look worse by comparison, given how little of its humor and drama hold up to the slightest scrutiny.
Rather than a Houston football final, the destination is a wedding in the Florida Keys, which sees four older women (played by stars in their 60s and 70s) reuniting despite a past fallout — whose details trickle out slowly over the course of 98 minutes — and meeting a few handsome gentlemen along the way. Despite the caliber of its cast, “The Fabulous Four” never shakes the feeling that its on-screen talent is being severely misused. If anything, Susan Sarandon, Bette Midler, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally manage to elevate the largely empty material to a level of borderline tolerable. However, the movie is often hard to watch — sometimes literally, given how often it fails to capture so much as basic reaction shots from any of its seasoned stars.
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Once best friends in college, New York surgeon Lou (Sarandon) and burgeoning TikTok personality Marilyn (Midler) haven’t spoken in years. However, the latter’s impending second wedding has led their old neighbors — promiscuous recording artist Alice (Mullally) and cannabis-cultivating grandma Kitty (Ralph) — to concoct a ploy to reunite them. This basic premise, along with the characters’ broad outlines, has oodles of comedic and dramatic promise, made all the more potent by the fact that Lou is fighting a ticking clock, fearing that her age might force her into retirement.
Unfortunately, these introductory flourishes, which establish the aforementioned personal and plot details, are about as lucid as the movie ever gets. From that point on, Jocelyn Moorhouse’s directing and Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly’s screenplay work in tandem to confound. Humor is certainly subjective, and to say that a film “isn’t funny” is rarely insightful critique, but “The Fabulous Four” lacks fundamental comedic clarity, making it difficult for viewers to locate its punchlines.
Some characters get accidentally high, though this is usually the joke in and of itself, rather than anything they say or do. The smell of spilled alcohol (rather than a visual stain) leads one character to assume another has urinated on herself; rarely can you spot a gag that wouldn’t work even with the assistance of Smell-O-Vision. At one point, the leading foursome are snappily told to “keep it down” when none of them are speaking loudly or saying anything embarrassing, while they’re all in a noisy space with no eavesdroppers nearby — one of many such head-scratching lines that falls apart no matter which way you slice it.
Each exchange in the film feels generated at random, with little care for who’s speaking (or to whom), or what scenario has actually led to a given exchange. It’s baffling to watch, though this makes it challenging to reverse-engineer, resulting in a fun little guessing game as to what the original line or premise might’ve been, in a presumable previous draft.
Sarandon makes a meal out of scraps, imbuing Lou’s story with genuine hurt and betrayal. Midler eventually gets to this stage as well, though she’s forced to spend much of her screening stretching incredulity. The film features numerous cases of mistaken identity which only work if every character is a complete idiot to a frustrating degree. There’s silly in an adorable-old-lady kind of way, but in “The Fabulous Four,” the silliness reveals half-baked writing that renders each of its lead characters a walking contradiction, defined by a single trait that isn’t explored or mined for its potential humor, let alone its potential to establish interpersonal dynamics.
Lou has a compulsion to clean, but this only manifests as dabbing the occasional tabletop with alcohol wipes (a fairly common sight in a post-COVID world). Marilyn is addicted to TikTok, but this has no function other than characters referring to the social media platform as though this were a joke in and of itself. Kitty has family issues that don’t intersect with the main plot. And Alice, well, she sleeps around with younger men, but no complications come of this.
There’s no sense of comedic causality in “The Fabulous Four,” even though it’s theoretically about how its characters’ actions impact one another. Its random happenings eventually culminate in a celebratory musical number that, while intended as a victory lap, yields secondhand embarrassment given how totally checked out the cast seems to be by this point. It’s as though they were meta-textually aware that their tremendous abilities were being wasted on a movie that, while well-meaning, is anything but fabulous.
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