The term "sit-com" can make a television show sound very formulaic and naff. Absolutely Fabulous was far too much fun and cautiously outrageous to be labelled merely a sit-com. The fact that it was on TV 20 years ago and that now they can bring it to the big screen at such a high profile is a testament to its quality and durability. But is the film any good?
Most successful small screen shows do not translate well on to the big screen, usually because the TV shows work because of their smallness, "Only Fools and Horses" was essentially a room with 3 generations of men in it exchanging banter; on TV it was gold but it would simply never work in a cinema where films are required to do so much more than that. But here AB Fab totally works and is as funny, sharp and outrageously devious as it was on TV. The plot, in so much as its actually important is that its two stars Patsy and Eiddy cause a bit of a ruckus at a trendy Soho celebrity event which leaves them hounded by the paps and press and seriously financially inhibited and in search of refuge, this takes them down to the French Riviera. Usually in sit-coms-to-the-big-screen adaptations this is where the wheels would normally come off but here it actually works perfectly well, partly because the TV show frequently went overseas anyway, so there's no sense of plot devise being shoe horned in, but mostly because it never stops being very funny, and that's the thing most film comedies don't do very well these days.
Ultimately it's all very throw away and light and at no point does anything serious or of substance come into the mix but who cares. The chief constituents are all here that made the TV show work so well. It's funny, sharp, and cruel in the right places and just the right running length so at the point when you think it needs to end now it obligingly does. It has a shed load of cameos to keep you pleasantly surprised throughout (for example Kate Moss, Joan Collins and many others) but it really didn't need to do that as the great one-liners are what you are rightly waiting for to come next, and they do.
Is it worth the entry fee? It is and well worth going to see twice actually.
