Movie Review: A Friendship Comedy in the Third Act of The Fabulous Four | Bollywood

Scheduling a movie release date is an imperfect science and sometimes an art. Just look at the masterpiece that was Barbenheimer.

While most moviegoers are open to experimenting to understand what audiences want and when in the Wild West of modern movie theaters, there’s also an unwritten rule that big superhero movie weekends are best left alone. But whoever came up with the idea of ​​opening the third act of female-buddy comedy The Fabulous Four alongside Deadpool & Wolverine deserves a raise. Because if there’s one audience that’s underserved during the opening weekend of a violent, self-referential, oxygen-draining superhero mashup, it’s women over 60.

So what better way to escape the loudmouth mercenary than a trip to Key West with Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally?

In the tradition of 80 for Brady and Book Club, The Fabulous Four may not be a great movie, but it’s also better than it looks. While it tends toward the raunchy with edibles and a parasailing expedition gone wrong, there’s also something admirably wholesome about it, even if you don’t believe it for a moment. It begins, like many films of this genre, with a somewhat tortured explanation of why these women became friends in their youth. While it nods to the slight age difference between college friends Lou and Marilyn and the two girls they met in New York, Alice and Kitty, it’s best not to do the math.

Moreover, the most interesting question is not why four single girls living in the same apartment building became friends, but rather how they maintained this closeness over the decades. This great mystery of life remains largely unexplored, focusing instead on the 40-year separation between Lou and Marilyn. It is a drama in which, for reasons completely incomprehensible, Alice and Kitty are always entangled.

Marilyn, recently widowed, has just gotten engaged and desperately wants Lou to be at her wedding. Alice and Kitty lure Lou to Key West under false pretenses, telling her that she has won a polydactyl cat and can visit Hemingway's house. They have nothing more elaborate up their sleeves in this lie. Their plan, it seems, is simply to go to Marilyn's house and surprise their unconscious hostage. It seems ill-advised at best, but becomes retroactively cruel when the cause of the fallout is finally revealed. Why intervene now?

The film was directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, the Australian filmmaker behind such wonderful and varied female-centric films as How to Make an American Quilt, The Dressmaker and Muriel's Wedding, and written by Jenna Milly and Ann Marie Allison. And it never quite comes together. These characters, as fabulous as they are individually or on paper, are not somehow greater together.

As Marilyn and Lou dance around this old feud, we start to feel bad for Alice and Kitty, who would have much more fun ditching them and having their own adventure. Midler plays Marilyn so big and broad that she’s more parody than person, though there’s a grain of intrigue in the septuagenarian who gets engaged two months after her beloved husband’s death and becomes obsessed with making TikToks. Sarandon’s Lou is the most thoughtful character, as a rule-abiding woman whose life is in desperate need of an overhaul. She has her awkward moments, too, but also several charming flirtations with the Key West singles.

It’s a movie that probably should have relied less on wild, diminishing-returns nonsense and more on the small moments of what it means to be friends for 40 years. But it’s not without its charm, either. I’m not going to argue with them when they start singing out of nowhere. That kind of break from reality, especially with this cast, is always welcome.

The Fabulous Four, which opens Friday on Bleecker Street, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for drug use, sexual content and strong language. Running time: 98 minutes. Two stars out of four.

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