The Fabulous Four, a film aimed at the historically underserved older female demographic, provides us with a more recent quandary. It’s a comedy that provides four women over the age of 65 with more screen time than they have become accustomed to, part of the post-Book Club boom that serves to remind the industry of the great many actors who have been sidelined as they’ve done the most unforgivable thing a woman can do in Hollywood: grow old.
Its mere existence is therefore a good thing, backs to be patted and applause to be given, but that’s where the cheering starts and ends. Because, like Poms and 80 for Brady and the Book Club sequel and May’s Summer Camp, it’s easier to admire its purpose than it is to actually enjoy it, good will depleting with every eye-rolling minute. It’s another example of a talented cast – Susan Sarandon, Bette Midler, Megan Mullally and Sheryl Lee Ralph – trying their very, very best with hopelessly sub-par material that they should be in the position to easily turn down yet something is understandably seen as better than nothing.
The moments in which the film works – fleeting and almost entirely in the first half - are then down to these women stoically trying to overcome the many obstacles that Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly’s silly, slapdash script puts in their way. For all of its superficial progressivism, the film too often relies on tiresome are-we-still-doing-this-shit cliche, most grimly in its portrayal of Sarandon’s workaholic surgeon Lou (AKA the Diane Keaton role). There’s brief texture in her introduction, forced to take over from another older male surgeon mid-operation, witnessing his career end before her own eyes and then reckoning with what that might mean for hers too. But the film then turns her into a Crazy Cat Lady, a woman without a husband or children putting any reserve non-work energy into her cat babies (a trope so fantastically annoying that even JD Vance has been trotting it out in his pathetic attempt to take down Kamala Harris).
It’s her obsession with owning one of the Ernest Hemingway Home’s six-toed cats (!) that allows old friends Alice (Mullally) and Kitty (Ralph) to fool her into travelling to Florida for a cat raffle (!) where instead, they’ll be dragging her along to the surprise wedding of Lou’s one-time BFF and now longtime adversary Marilyn (Midler). The two fell out years ago over a man and tensions come to the surface as the four spend a long weekend together.
The treatment of Sarandon’s co-protagonist is indicative of how the script handles so many of the film’s ideas: something sharp or difficult is introduced and then it’s sanded down to nothing. Any vague interest in exploring the nuances of these women is passed aside for the now textbook comedy set pieces involving weed gummies (yawn), parasailing, vibrators, social media and strippers. This would all be fine (let older women have fun, etc) if any of it was remotely funny, but despite the unusual R-rating, it’s all far too well-behaved, an over-reliance on over-pronounced physical comedy making it feel more like a film for kids. Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse is unable to decide upon the right tone for any of it (a similar issue plagued her last film, the catastrophic Kate Winslet vehicle The Dressmaker) and so settles for canned sitcom pilot, turning a big-screen opportunity into something more suited to the small screen.
Out of the women, the ever-reliable Sarandon fares the best despite the almost cruel characterisation she’s battling against (for a film where she plays an older woman who is actually written as a real person, please watch The Meddler) and there’s a zip to her scenes with Midler even if their big confrontation underwhelms. Mullally and Ralph get very little to do but the former has an almost infectious amount of fun as a toyboy-chasing musician.
As an inevitable plot twist leads to an inevitable showdown which leads to an inevitable makeup which leads to an inevitable, and unbearable, all-cast song-and-dance number, you’ll be left wondering how bringing together fabulous women has left us all feeling so utterly unfabulous.
The Fabulous Four is out in US cinemas on 26 July, in Australia on 1 August and in the UK at a later date
