Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
Edina and Patsy hit the Riviera Dir: Mandie Fletcher 1hr 30mins (15)
“Would it be fabulous, sweetie?” That was the question plaguing every fan of Absolutely Fabulous on learning that their favourite 1990s sitcom was going to get the big-screen treatment, said Stefan Kyriazis in the Daily Express. They need not have worried, said David Edwards in the Daily Mirror. This feature-length outing for Edina and Patsy – the swearing, booze-swilling, fag-toting British fashionistas (played by Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley) – is a “Bollinger-soaked, age-defying, diamond-encrusted triumph”. It will “make you laugh so loud and long you may need a facelift”.
It’s not quite the instant classic that implies, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The sketchy plot sees Edina attempting to save her ailing PR firm by signing Kate Moss as a client. Accosting the supermodel at a party, she accidentally knocks her into the Thames, apparently killing her. So she and Patsy scarper to the French Riviera to lie low – and if possible, bag a rich husband while they’re at it. This thin material is padded out with an endless sequence of celebrity cameos, not all of which are that entertaining. “With every syllable” that Stella Mccartney utters, for example, the film becomes less funny. Thankfully, Saunders, who wrote the script, retains her droll eye for detail, said Kate Muir in The Times. I loved the way Moss’s mourners affirm her lifestyle choices by adorning her shrine with bottles of sauvignon blanc and Hunter wellies. And some of the cameos are amusing, notably Mad Men’s Jon Hamm as an old flame of Patsy – “You took my virginity. Please leave me my sanity,” he begs her – and Jerry Hall, droning on about her Chanel accessories.
If you think it all sounds a bit tired, I’m afraid you’d be right, said Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times. I admit I laughed when, on a budget flight, Patsy gets tasered by an angry air hostess (Rebel Wilson) and seems to enjoy it (“You don’t get that on British Airways,” she gasps appreciatively). But by the end I felt I’d been repeatedly “tasered, semi-painlessly, on a long, long flight to nowhere new”. I agree that the relentless “star-spotting” is rather “silly”, said Libby Purves in the Daily Mail, but Ab Fab fans will still adore this film. Saunders and Lumley are both on “top form” – especially Lumley, gleefully wielding Patsy’s terrifying trademark sneer. (It is based, she once told me, on the expression you were always ordered at school to “take off your face”.) The pair bring “such zest” to their roles that “clunkier moments”, of which there are a few, are “easily overlooked”, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. “For a post-brexit Britain looking for something to cheer it up, this film is a shot in the arm.”