Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016)

The Age of Commercialism

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

While the movie starts out a little slow, once it really gets going its amazing!! Obviously you have to have seen the show, its picks up right where the series left off. Everyone from the show is still there... patsy and edina are wonderfully trashy and tragic, her daffy mother is adorable and saffy is as big an awful buzz kill as ever. The ending is paying homage to a certain classic movie, I wont say which but its so fabulous!!

Several years on from when we last saw Patsy and Eddy, Patsy is still in her fashion critic role but Eddie's fortunes have waned. Her list of PR clients is limited and low-key and her memoirs are not going to get published. While attempting to gain Kate Moss as a client, Eddie accidentally pushes her into the River Thames. Moss does not reappear and Eddie becomes a murder suspect, and Public Enemy Number 1. To escape the publicity Eddie and Patsy head for Nice.Being a fan of the TV series I did not have great expectations for this movie. TV-to-movie conversions seldom work and in this case the TV series finished four years previously and was pretty much done long before that. In the end, I was right about the conversion aspect - there's not enough material to sustain a feature film and the movie is festooned with silly scenes to pad out the time. The characters haven't aged well, and Joanna Lumley's script has not really adapted to their aging, seeming to still be based in the 90s in terms of character traits. Saffy / Julia Sawalha and Bubble / Jane Horrocks are particularly hard done by in this regard. This said, its not all bad. There is a great swipe at the pretentiousness of the fashion industry and the superficiality of the media. There are also a few very funny moments. While the main characters feel like they're misplaced in time, and are living off old glories, some of the secondary characters make up for this. Kathy Burke as Magda is particularly entertaining.Ultimately quite uneven with just enough good bits to make it likable.

If this succeeds in anything, this big screen version of the 1990's British cult sitcom proves to me the ridiculousness of the fashion industry and the pretentious people who work in it. Leading ostentatious lives, these are the most absurd elements of society who thrive on drama and ridiculous trends. Jennifer Saunders and Joanne Lumley seem stuck in time which has marched on by and left them eternally corked. The entire family still lives together even though daughter Saffie obviously cannot stand her mother Edina. Now in her 90's, mother June Whitfield seems numbed by the absurdity of the situation. While funny on TV, Patsy and Edina seem out of their minds and just nasty in their big screen debut.Trying too hard to be gay and hip, that element of this film is overly obnoxious and stereotypical. They are cartoon characters in every way they can be. The premise of Patsy and Edina becoming notorious simply because they may or may not have been responsible for the accidental death of Kate Moss is ridiculous. Dizzy Bubbles wears the most absurd outfits with inflated hashtags on her top that I wanted to pop with that stupid selfie stick she carries around. The costumes seem like the aftermath of an explosion at "Wicked" backstage. With the trend of bringing back old shows either in TV or movie form, this should be the guide as to how not to do it. I found this almost instantly to be beyond crude and insipid.

A movie produced on the same material 25 years after the heyday of a television show will take a toll on quality. At the time, the Dawn French / Joana Lumley show traded on its subversive material and outrageous performances. Since then the world has moved dramatically toward the outpost the two established for themselves putting the show's aesthetic somewhere in the middle of the culture. So relying on the same shock value jokes from the early 90's results in the film's now mildly eye-raising but still mostly funny lines. All of the standbys from the original appear: Eddie gives her daughter poor parenting advice, her daughter lectures her to be more conservative, Lumley pulls out her "Pat Stone" routine at one point, she blacks out, etc., etc., etc. Vintage stuff if a little worn. The softness of the script benefits from a very long list of cameos although American audiences will miss many of the local British faces who didn't quite become global names. In short, like "Zoolander 2", AbFab the movie relies more on nostalgia than good writing but for hardcore fans that may be enough.