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 genre of the 1930s and .