The Fabulous Four review: absolutely not fab

I’ve always admired Jocelyn Moorhouse for the way she can find weirdness in the everyday. Proof (1991) and The Dressmaker (2015) are two of her best works, and in her latest film The Fabulous Four, I was looking forward to seeing how she might tweak the clichés of the ‘golden girl gang’ movie.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that Moorhouse also directed the formulaic ensemble melodrama How to Make an American Quilt (1995). It’s as if she has ‘American mode’ and ‘Australian mode’. Or maybe she needed a better script than The Fabulous Four, which feels not so much warmed over as left out too long in the Florida sun.

Surely it’s purely for paychecks that films like this keep getting made. The First Wives Club (1996) is nearly 30 years old now, and yet Diane Keaton stars in The Book Club: The Next Chapter (2023), while Bette Midler (now aged 78) is one of The Fabulous Four – along with Susan Sarandon (aged 77), Megan Mullally (aged 65) and Sheryl Lee Ralph (aged 67). (Sissy Spacek, aged 74, wisely bowed out due to ‘scheduling conflicts’.)

I left this film feeling dispirited about Hollywood’s limited view of actresses – and audiences. The game cast try their best with some unbelievably clichéd material, but I regret to report that their best isn’t very good. It’s quite bad.

Fabulous Four formula

A montage of archival photos of the stars in their youth introduces two college friends, free-spirited Marilyn (Midler) and bookish Lou (Sarandon), who moved together to New York City and befriended their neighbours, aspiring singer Alice (Mullally) and nature-loving Kitty (Ralph).

Now, they’re all variously unpleasant. Lou’s a brilliant but humourless cardiac surgeon fighting retirement, who dotes on her two cats. Alice is an in-demand rock singer who’s also juvenile, horny and constantly wasted. Kitty is a successful organic farmer and weedpreneur whose fanatically religious daughter disapproves of her lifestyle.

And the wealthy, room-illiterate Marilyn is retiring to Key West, Florida with her dead husband’s ashes, where she spends her time making tryhard TikToks. (Sophie von Haselberg, Midler’s real-life daughter and uncanny lookalike, cameos as Marilyn’s daughter.)

Next thing, Marilyn’s announcing her unexpected remarriage – that same week. She wants to reunite the Fabulous Four as her crones of honour for a week of superannuated bachelorette-in-paradise celebrations. Awkwardly, however, Lou hasn’t spoken to Marilyn ever since Marilyn stole – and married – the love of Lou’s life. So Alice and Kitty connive to lure Lou to Key West by pretending she’s won a contest to adopt a polydactyl cat from the Hemingway Home.

Like the false urgency of Marilyn’s wedding, and the glaring absence of Marilyn’s fiancé until the night beforehand, this threadbare plot device only reveals how insultingly rickety the script is.

The Fabulous Four: ab-drab

Because the film basically storyboards itself, I felt more resignation than laughter in the depressingly wacky antics that follow, most of them at Lou’s expense. I found myself sympathising with Lou for distancing herself from women who treated her so disrespectfully.

On the plane, Lou is seated with a Gen-Z bachelorette gang who are also heading to Key West, and her uptight, surly demeanour unexpectedly endears her to them. They become the film’s Greek chorus, filming her with their ever-present phones.

Marilyn gifts Lou a kegel exercise device, which she uses to foil a bike robbery during a meet-cute with the bike’s appreciative owner, local barkeep Ted (Bruce Greenwood). Alice, however, has no need for kegels due to her constant hookups with younger men. Also, she smuggles drugs in her vagina.

Marilyn gets a lap dance from a male stripper whose butt-cheek birthmark Kitty recognises. Lou inevitably ingests way too many of Kitty’s super-strong brownies and gummies during a parasailing trip, accidentally untethering her screaming friends and sliding into a stoned fantasia that their boat captain (Timothy V Murphy) is Ernest Hemingway.

It was dismaying to hear other critics in the cinema enjoying all this.

The Fabulous Four: unfunny frivolity

I have to admit the film wrung a laugh from me when it showed the TikToks featuring the unwitting Lou as ‘Dr Love’. It was a rare moment of knowing cultural relevance in this otherwise suffocatingly hermetic film, which gave the sense that it could have been directed by anyone, at any stage in the past 30 years, starring any old actresses, without materially changing the final product.

An aggressively intertextual and self-aware film like Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) feels like the height of wit compared to The Fabulous Four, which goes through its motions in an unfunny vacuum where Bette Midler never had wind beneath her self-involved wings in Beaches (1988); where Susan Sarandon was never an uptight prude in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975); where Megan Mullally and Sheryl Lee Ralph were never Broadway and TV sitcom veterans.

Indeed, at times this film felt like the corpse of a breezy Mamma Mia-style musical murdered by some high-up studio suit. Like, why else would you cast such a deep bench of musical talent, and then throw it away on a weirdly pointless cameo by Michael Bolton? He was having a ball roasting his own easy-listening reputation in the Lonely Island’s ‘Jack Sparrow’ – but here, Bolton looks (to put is as mildly as possible) uncomfortable.

The film ends, inexplicably, with a song-and-dance finale to ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ – a song with no thematic relevance to anything we just watched – performed by the cast on a beach terrace at golden hour. It wasn’t fabulous. Nothing in this film was.

The Fabulous Four is in cinemas from 1 August.