‘The Fabulous Four’ Review: Susan Sarandon v. Bette Midler — Dawn of Just ‘Eh’

Movies are a window into worlds we will never know. Historical periods we can never visit, planets we can never explore. Through the magic of movies we share experiences that real life cannot offer us, and while many films use that magic to tell tall tales about space wizards with laser swords, or islands populated by genetically-engineered dinosaurs, it’s films like “The Fabulous Four” that really let us live out our most impossible fantasies — like being able to afford to retire one day, or even just go on vacation.

“The Fabulous Four” is a hangout movie, a mild, low-stakes cavort in a vacation-friendly environment with the biggest and best actors the filmmakers could get to play lifelong best friends. They got a great ensemble: Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally and Sheryl Lee Ralph. That is a fabulous group of actors indeed. If you want to see them get into hilarious hijinks or serious melodrama, you will unfortunately have to look elsewhere. But if you want to see them get stoned and bicker in an expensive beach house, look no further.

Films like “The Fabulous Four” are their own brand of comfort food; not especially nutritious but casually satisfying. They will not change your life, and they have no intention of trying. They’re supposed to be a salve, an amiable gathering of mildly fun people having mildly fun times. That they are also a tacit celebration of excess is probably not supposed to remind us of the bourgeois Telefoni Bianchi genre of the 1930s and 1940s, whose depiction of whitewashed life led to an artistic backlash and helped spawn the Italian Neorealist Movement — but it still kinda does.

Moving on: Susan Sarandon stars as Lou, a heart surgeon living alone with two cats because many decades ago her boyfriend, Jeff, was stolen by her so-called best friend, Marilyn (Midler). They haven’t spoken since but they still have two best friends in common: Alice (Mullally), a professional singer who’s even better at doing drugs and sleeping around, and Kitty (Ralph), who grows cannabis but is growing more tired of her ultra-religious daughter Leslie (Brandee Evans) teaching her grandkids that she’s going to hell.

Marilyn is getting married again, just six months after Jeff passed away. (We never see Jeff except in a photograph, and it looks like they either photoshopped in a young Jeff Bridges, or they didn’t bother to photoshop out the fact that this guy looks a lot like Jeff Bridges.) She invites Alice and Kitty to be her bridesmaids in luxurious Key West, Florida, and they trick Lou into coming by claiming [checks notes]… that she won a free polydactyl cat that was raised in the historic home of Ernest Hemingway.

It’s true that Hemingway’s estate is home to over 60 cats with an unusual number of toes. It’s implausible that they’d ever give one away in a raffle. But Lou buys it because the script has to get her to Key West somehow. When she finally figures out she’s been had it’s too late, and now she has to play nice with Marilyn — who never even apologized for stealing Jeff — while they do touristy activities, get wasted and flirt with Bruce Greenwood, a local bar owner who Lou falls for right away (and who wouldn’t?).

“The Fabulous Four” is a film of simple and somewhat boring pleasures, and let’s be honest — there’s a place for that. It doesn’t always make great use of Key West as a location, at one point seemingly forgetting to get an insert shot of the view from Marilyn’s house, instead cutting in a seemingly random exterior shot from somewhere else on the island. But there’s also a guy driving around in a little vehicle that is also a fully-functional miniature bar, and that’s a great find.

The film also doesn’t always make the best use of its cast. Susan Sarandon eats up most of the film’s big moments; she even gets to use a Kegel ball to exact vigilante justice on a bike thief (it is not as exciting as it sounds). Megan Mullally doesn’t just get all the best one-liners, she practically hoards them. Sheryl Lee Ralph is a shining light in every scene she’s in, and even gets to have a tender moment with her grandson while wearing jiggly-penis antennae on her head, which I assure you makes sense in context.

Unfortunately Bette Midler is oddly wasted, and I don’t just mean because there’s a scene where she eats weed gummies and chugs champagne in a bathtub while wearing a full wedding dress, odd and wasted though that may technically be. She’s as multifaceted a performer as anyone in her generation, explosively funny and a brilliant singer to boot. You just wouldn’t know it from watching “The Fabulous Four,” which never gives her the material she needs to work some magic. Then again she makes out better than famed singer Michael Bolton, whose brief cameo leaves slightly less of an impression than the photograph that might be Jeff Bridges.

“The Fabulous Four” is directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, who went on a legendary run in the 1990s with the fine dramas “Proof,” “How to Make an American Quilt” and “A Thousand Acres.” She’s not in that mode here, perhaps because the material is a little generic, or perhaps because this is just supposed to be a fun project. One gets the impression on a movie like this that the filmmakers had fun making it, or at least had fun hanging out in Key West while the cameras weren’t rolling.

That’s not the problem though. The problem is that not enough of the fun rubs off on us, the audience, to make this experience truly worthwhile.

“The Fabulous Four” opens exclusively in theaters on July 26.

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