Writer: Jennifer Saunders
Director: Mandie Fletcher
Edina (Saunders) and Patsy (Lumley) are still living the high life in London, despite Edina's dwindling PR client list. Spurred on by an opportunity to represent Kate Moss, Edina pursues the supermodel at an exclusive launch party only for things to go catastrophically wrong, resulting in Kate Moss going missing in the Thames and Edina and Patsy going missing to the French Riviera in an attempt to escape the growing chaos back home...
In the run-up to seeing this I heard people say they loved this and I also heard people say they hated it. Well, I'm going to say that I neither loved nor hated it. Some of this movie works very well and some of it doesn't work at all, which makes for a slightly frustrating experience. I laughed, don't get me wrong, just not as much as I was expecting to.
As you'd expect, Saunders and Lumley have their characters down pat and the interaction between them is terrific. Lumley, as ever, is nothing short of brilliant as the almost permanently sozzled Patsy and she's given plenty of moments to shine, my personal favourite being her chat with a bemused/terrified Jon Hamm.
For fans of the series, it's also a chance to check back in with some beloved characters from the series, notably Jane Horrocks' Bubble, still on another planet, and Julia Sawalha as Edina's put-upon daughter Saffy, still tutting on the sidelines and trying to do the right thing. Saffy has a daughter of her own and this will cause its own set of issues.
One of the problems here is that, Bubble and Saffy (and perhaps Kathy Burke as brutal fashionista Magda) aside, the movie tries to crowbar in so many of the original cast that they're invariably given little more than a glorified walk-on part. Christopher Ryan, Mo Gaffney, Helen Lederer and Harriet Thorpe disappear as quickly as they show up.
Outside of this, it's stuffed to the gills with cameos from models, actors, singers, comedians, news reporters and general celebrities including Lara Stone, Jerry Hall, Poppy Delevigne, Alexa Chung, Lily Cole, Gwendoline Christie, Rebel Wilson (great as a cabin crew member on a budget airline), Emma Bunton, Graham Norton, Kirsty Wark, Sophie Raworth, Sadie Frost, Stella McCartney....and that's just a subset. Was it a competition to cram in as many famous UK people as possible?
And if there are too many celebrity cameos to take, there are way too many supporting characters given sub-plots which a 91-minute movie can't hope to sustain: Robert Webb as a policeman (and boyfriend of Saffy) who's investigating the disappearance of Kate Moss and trying to track down Edina and Patsy after they've gone on the lam; Mark Gatiss as a potential publisher of Edina's memoirs; Celia Imrie as a rival PR guru; Lulu as a vengeful client of Edina's; Barry Humphries as an old flame of Patsy's; June Whitfield as Edina's mum, who's gone to Cannes in order to activate a plot device; a chance meeting with the world's richest woman; Jean-Paul Gaultier wandering the beach with his metal detector...
Actually, Jean-Paul Gaultier's pretty funny but you see what I mean in terms of what's going on here. And yet, most of the plot threads are hurriedly resolved (or, in Imrie's case, jettisoned completely) in a rush to get to the end credits without building to anything resembling a proper climax. In one line of dialogue, that's it. It's over. Quick jump to what happened next. Roll the titles.
Having said that all of this, there are a number of inspired moments and a handful of majorly chucklesome lines but, given the pedigree and general hilarity of the TV series which spawned this cinematic spin-off, it's a bit of a shame that Edina and Patsy haven't quite been given the send-off they deserve. Some sequences are great, some fall bafflingly flat, some seem to belong in another movie. The uninitiated (is there anyone out there going to see this who has never seen the TV show?) may very well wonder what the fuss is about, more forgiving fans of Edina and Patsy might think this is, indeed, absolutely fabulous. What did I think? Not terrible but not much of a reason to break out the Bolly, sweetie darling.
No comments:
Post a Comment