If you’re a distinguished older male actor in Hollywood, you’re typically cast as Batman’s sidekick or a WWII veteran who escapes from assisted living (Michael Caine), God or a grieving father (Morgan Freeman), a brilliant psychotherapist or Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an action hero (Tom Cruise), Sigmund Freud and a Roman emperor (Sir Anthony Hopkins), or a daring drug mule (Clint Eastwood). But distinguished older actresses get cast in simple-minded comedies about old friends having silly adventures that make the lightest-weight beach read seem like Remembrance of Things Past. “The Fabulous Four” follows in the unfortunate tradition of the “Book Club” movies, “Summer Camp,” and “80 for Brady,” with an EGOT-full of brilliant talents mired in antics that “The Golden Girls” would consider too ridiculous.
The quartet in this film is Susan Sarandon as Lou, an uptight, humorless cat lady and cardiac surgeon; Bette Midler as Marilyn, a wealthy recent widow who impulsively decided to get married again two months after the death of her husband of 48 years; Megan Mullally as Alice, a popular singer who is perpetually tipsy, high on drugs, or having sex with randos, sometimes all at once; and Sheryl Lee Ralph as Kitty, a kind-hearted weed grower and mother of an adult daughter who has suddenly become rigidly religious. You can glimpse Midler’s real-life daughter, Sophie von Haselberg, playing Marilyn’s daughter early in the film.
Marilyn is staying in a gorgeous mansion in Key West, where Ernest Hemingway lived when he wrote two of his books, which we are told so often they could be getting paid by the mention. She invites Kitty and Alice to her wedding but does not invite Lou because they have been estranged for years. So Kitty and Alice tell Lou the kind of preposterous lie that only works in painfully contrived screenplays: they don’t mention Marilyn. They just say she has won a six-toed cat from the Hemingway House.
When Lou finds out she’s been tricked, she agrees to stay. However, she is clearly still in pain over the sense of betrayal by Marilyn, for reasons telegraphed so unmistakably from her arrival in Key West that the ultimate reveal carries no weight. Throughout the trip, she keeps running into a group of 20-somethings she met on the plane and accidentally becomes their badass ideal.
Marilyn is so excited about her over-the-top wedding plans she barely notices that her friends think she is over the top. For another one of those reasons that only works in painfully contrived screenplays, she does not introduce her fiancé to her friends until the night before the wedding so there can be a very predictable twist. But the four are too busy having wacky adventures. Lou uses a Kegel (pelvic floor) exercise ball Marilyn gave her as a slingshot to take out a bicycle thief! Lou accidentally unties the rope to the parasail because she is hallucinating! Yes, it is supposed to be a funny prank that Lou’s closest friends dose her with weed without telling her. Another intended-to-be hilarious scene takes place in a strip club, where a star performer connected to one of the women is recognized when she sees the birthmark on his bare butt while he is grinding on the bride-to-be.
The Internet Movie Database lists more than 40 producers for “The Fabulous Four,” most of them “executive producers,” which can mean anything. Three are Mullaly, Sarandon, and Ralph. These women know what they are capable of, and they know what a good script is. Was a silly comedy the only project they could get funded? Or did they just want an all-expenses-paid trip to Key West? It does look spectacularly beautiful, though there are too many shots of chickens.
The stars do their best to bring warmth and charisma with criminally under-written characters engaging in silly antics. There are lovely moments when they sing, including a duet with Michael Bolton(!). It just makes us wish it was a concert film. Or, as Gene Siskel used to say, we would be better off watching a film of the four actresses sitting around, talking about their lives. Instead, we get tired “jokes” about powerful weed gummies, an older person sharing every minute of her life with ridiculous TikToks, characters tearing each other’s clothes off in a fight and then somehow making up, and a character unexpectedly becoming a hero to some young people even though they have never heard of Joan Didion. Like these other actresses-of-a-certain-age movies, the entire story is grounded on some notion of a deep and sustaining friendship. But it’s hard to believe these women have any genuine connection other than cashing a check for a film that is not fabulous but forgettable.
