Film review: Absolutely Fabulous

The Absolutely Fabulous team is back — with a cast of cameos bigger than a Paris fashion show.

Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in Absolutley Fabulous.

Absolutely Fabulous(M), national release. Score: 2.5 out of 5

Absolutely Fabulous, written by Jennifer Saunders, is based on the successful 1990s British television comedy about women behaving very badly. Saunders wrote and starred in the sitcom, which had its origin in a sketch she did with Dawn French. The TV show was wittily subversive in its disdain for family values and enthusiasm for egocentric, champagne-fuelled misbehaviour.

This big-screen version has its share of amusements too, not least because of passing time. Celebrity publicist Edina Monsoon (Saunders) and her fashion magazine editor friend Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) are desperately, funnily aware that they are hardly spring chickens. “There was the time when the zeitgeist blew through me,’’ Eddy laments early on.

Most of the television cast are reunited, including Julia Sawalha as Eddy’s po-faced daughter Saffron, June Whitfield as Eddy’s mother and Jane Horrocks as Eddy’s zany but smart (she reads Nietzsche) assistant Bubble. They’re neatly brought together by director Mandie Fletcher, whose TV credits include Blackadder and the excellent 1980s Geoffrey Palmer-Wendy Craig comedy Butterflies.

But the real people-watching exercise — and how appropriate that is in a film about people who crave attention — is in the 60 or so cameo roles. Barry Humphries oils around as one of Patsy’s old lovers (and I think Dame Edna appears in a pool at one point), Jon Hamm loses his composure as, well, one of Patsy’s old lovers, Stella McCartney proves herself handy with a brick, Jerry Hall is dryly funny about her fashion obsessions, and Rebel Wilson is a knockout as a flight attendant on a budget airline. We don’t see Kylie Minogue (I think) but she belts out the theme song, This Wheel’s on Fire.

The main cameo though comes from model Kate Moss. When Eddy ambushes her at a fashion week party, trying to sign her up as a client, the result is catastrophic. Eddy becomes the most wanted woman in the world, not in a way she’d like, and she and Patsy flee to the south of France, where they find more champagne and a gender-bending chance to make their fortune.

Absolutely Fabulous walks a tart line between embracing celebrity culture and rejecting it. “I put Bono behind yellow glasses, I took Sting to a rainforest,’’ Eddy declares. But so what? When Eddy pitches her memoir to publishing behemoth Penguin Random House she’s told her life isn’t worth writing about because “it’s happened’’. That isn’t necessarily true, however. When Patsy is asked at one point why she has stuck by Eddy all these years, she says without hesitation, “Because it’s bloody good fun.’’

Fun is something we all can use at the moment, with the world in a bit of disarray.

Ab Fab did well on its opening weekend in Britain, where it was seen as a tonic to the Brexit blues. It and Suicide Squad are entertainments to enjoy one day and forget about the next.