‘The Fabulous Four’ Review – Underwhelming Script Fails A Winning Formula

There’s a certain magic that happens when you take three or more older women, put them on an adventure, and watch the hilarity ensue. It has been true since the days of Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty, and Betty White forming The Golden Girls, a television show so ahead of its time that it spawned generations of remakes from Designing Women to Hot In Cleveland. This has also been true in film. We saw it in 1980 when Dolly Parton teamed up with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin to kill their sexist boss in Nine to Five. And again when Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton teamed up to take out their ex-husbands in 1996’s The First Wives Club. 

More recently the subgenre has seen a resurgence such as in 2017 in Malcolm D. Lee’s Girls Trip, which saw Jada Pinkett-Smith, Tiffany Haddish, Queen Latifah, and Regina Hall have a wild weekend in New Orleans. And we saw it most recently, in 2023 when Tomlin and Fonda teamed up again, this time alongside Sally Field and Rita Moreno to go see the Super Bowl in 80 for Brady. Each film is a fun romp. A hilarious adventure through the lives of older women as they find love, rediscover their friendships, and learn to laugh at themselves. Some of that is here in the newest such outing, The Fabulous Four, but it’s just the bare bones. We’re missing the heart, a lot of the hilarity, and a bunch of the pathos that make an older lady comedy the gem that it should be.

Our ensemble is an actual cast of fabulous performers. You’ve got the incredibly funny Megan Mullally (Parks and Recreation), the legendary Susan Sarandon (Thelma & Louise), the incomparable Sheryl Lee Ralph (Abbott Elementary), and once again, the multi-talented, Bette Midler. They star as four estranged friends who come together in Key West as Marilyn (Midler) is getting married again, six months after her husband has passed. A husband who we come to find out was originally dating Marilyn’s friend, Lou (Sarandon), which caused the rift between the two friends ever since. Kitty (Ralph) is a pot grower with her own farm and a highly religious daughter, while Alice (Mullally) is a famous singer who’s also a nymphomaniac and prefers younger men. 

Each of these characters should come with their own innate humor, but the way each of them is written lingers too often between either repetitive or sincere, so the humorous moments that are supposed to happen in the script are immediately undercut by the dramatic shift in tone the film takes in the next minute. One of the funnier moments in the film comes when Lou accidentally takes a few edibles and begins to hallucinate while her friends are parasailing. What should be a gut-busting barrel of laughs as she fights her hallucination while the other girls fall from the sky ends up being a dramatic flourish of emotions as Lou challenges Marilyn’s immaturity and a group of young kids’ lack of knowledge around literary figures from the 1970s. (But you may learn a little bit more about Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion, so there’s a good thing.) It really drags the film down, and those moments happen consistently throughout the film.

Kitty’s potent marijuana mixes and Alice’s uncontrollable sexuality aren’t given enough variety to be humorous more than once, and Midler’s attempt to play up being an immature, TikTok addicted, out-out-touch, elder Gen Z-er goes a little too over the top at times that it feels very much like she’s trying too hard. Most of the performances are failed by the script which didn’t capture any of the magic of the films it aspires to be like. It’s got the fabulous cast, the gorgeous setting, and some decent gags, but it never finds its own identity to stand out from the pack, or justify its existence among older lady comedy gold. 

The Fabulous Four is currently playing in theaters courtesy of Bleecker Street.