Nearly 25 years since Edina (Jennifer Saunders) and Patsy (Joanna Lumley) first staggered on to our televisions, they finally make their big-screen debut. And like many TV spin-offs (most recently the Entourage film), material which worked in a 30-minute episode feels as painfully stretched as a botched facelift at feature-film length. Still, the booze-storming performances from Saunders and Lumley provide a welcome, if slightly sozzled, levity. The timing is fortuitous too – the film provides a champagne bubble of counter-programming for both the football-averse and the news-weary.
Directed by Mandie Fletcher, responsible for several Ab Fab television episodes, and written by Saunders, the film, like its subjects, is chaotic, frequently lazy and unhealthily obsessed with celebrity. Famous faces too numerous to list pop up instead of punchlines – this is comedy which leans on familiarity like the perma-drunk Edina leans on her put-upon assistant, Bubble (Jane Horrocks). There are a few attempts to bring the material up to date – Bubble wears an outfit made of hashtags, there’s a slightly glib reference to transgender issues – but mostly the film relies on in-jokes and hag gags.
That’s not to say it isn’t funny. Lumley in particular is a blast: as Patsy, she has perfected a deathly leer of a smile that looks like it was painted on by a mortician. Saunders generously gives her many of the best lines, and Lumley repays in kind by chewing them up and spitting them out in an impeccably timed deadpan snarl. Saunders is also enjoyably silly: Edina still dresses like something you might find inside the head of a hyperactive five-year-old. And she has a similar attention span – a scene in which she attempts transcendental meditation is amusing. It’s just that, for all the Bolly swigged, it’s not quite the vintage comedy we might have hoped for.
