THE FABULOUS FOUR - Mark Reviews Movies

The Fabulous Four, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 25, 2024

The Fabulous Four fits squarely into a formula that's becoming so prevalent it might soon become its own genre, instead of just a trend. In the movie, a group of four longtime friends, each one with a distinct personality, reunite after being apart for a while. The friends are all played by actresses of some esteem and of the Baby Boomer generation, and for whatever differences and conflicts may exist between the pals, the focus of the movie is mainly on the antics of some broad comedy.

To name some examples of this trend would do a disservice to most of them, which generally aren't good in the first place. This one's particularly bad, in that the jokes are obvious, the only potentially interesting elements of the plot are held back until the third act, and even the stars seem bored and disheartened by the material. We can't blame them.

The two leads are Susan Sarandon and Bette Midler, both of whom deserve much, much better. Their only consolations, perhaps, are the paycheck and what must have felt like a little vacation to a sunny locale. Let's hope they weren't counting on the script promising them a couple months in Key West, Florida, since the end credits announce that the movie was shot in Georgia, which probably saved the producers a decent amount on accommodations and with the state's industry-friendly tax incentives.

Sarandon plays Lou, a straitlaced and stuffy heart surgeon who has never married, lives with a pair of cats, and worries that her job might be in jeopardy due to her age. As any by-the-books person with an existential level of dread about the only thing she has in life would do, Lou drops everything at the last second for a spontaneous trip to Key West, with the promise of having won a six-toed cat from Ernest Hemmingway's house. Lou is skeptical and cynical about everything, apparently, unless it's required for the story to occur.

She's lured from home and work by the other two friends in the group. They're Alice (Megan Mullally), a singer of an uncertain degree of fame (She toured with the Rolling Stones, while Michael Bolton, who appears in a visibly uncomfortable cameo, knows her by name, but no one other than her best friends even recognizes her), and Kitty (Sheryl Lee Ralph), who runs a cannabis farm.

Alice's other trait is that she's the clichéd friend of the clichéd group who really, really enjoys sex. All of her jokes revolve around that, even the ones involving her appreciation of Kitty's product (She smuggles some of it on the plane in a place where the sun doesn't shine—no, the other one). They're technically examples of innuendo for the most part, although the idea of referring to one part of a man's anatomy as a glue gun is certainly questionable in that regard, beyond whatever screenwriters Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly might be implying with that metaphor.

Kitty's here, too, and Ralph should probably feel some relief that her presence here isn't nearly as significant as her co-stars. Her character exists for an odd subplot involving her cult-member daughter (played by Brandee Evans) and the daughter's banishment of her own son (played by Kadan Well Bennett), who has a distinct birthmark. Alice apparently knows it intimately (Don't ask, because the movie, thankfully, doesn't answer), and it would be quite noticeable if, say, Kitty ends up seeing him in a thong on a stage. To give the movie some credit, the predictability of that gag is at least much lower than the one in which the stuck-up Lou unwittingly ingests a bunch of marijuana-infused snacks, because of course the filmmakers are so lazy as to include that joke.

Does the plot even matter at this point? The friends have come to Key West for the wedding of Midler's Marilyn, a widow of six months who has come to an arrangement with a man, himself a widower, so they won't be alone. The dead husband, by the way, was dating Lou when Marilyn met him. More than four decades later, Lou is still resentful, leading to some bickering, a far-too-late revelation involving one of the two men (played by Bruce Greenwood and Timothy V. Murphy) who quickly fall for Lou, and a wedding-day fight that says more about the desperation of the screenplay than anything else.

It all looks to have been made on the quick and cheap, too, which makes The Fabulous Four even more dispiriting. Nobody seemed to care, and watching it, the feeling is entirely mutual.

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