Absolutely awful: Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders team up again for the terrible Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.
ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS: THE MOVIE 1/2 (91 minutes) M
Oh, the pain. The dire attempt to squeeze more laughs out of the TV comedy concept cooked up by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French back in the 1990s is bloody awful.
The film should have been called Absolutely Crapulous.
Largely laughless, stuffed with silly cameos and brandishing a barely-there story, the real tragedy about this travesty is how the satirical fangs the TV show brandished - as it hammered nails into social climbers, hipsters, bad parenting and celebrity - have been comprehensively ground down to blunt stumps by political correctness.
One would have hoped that PR agent Edwina (Saunders), and her best friend Patsy (Joanna Lumley) would have been more hilariously offensive than ever as they dealt with their love of booze, drugs, promiscuous sex and partying, not giving a toss what anybody said.
Yet all we get is a lame road trip as the duo go in search of model Kate Moss after knocking her into the Thames during a soiree. There's not one decently nasty joke in the entire film.
As with the appalling Entourage and Kath & Kim movies, fans of the TV show - a genuinely witty, sharp-edged satire that has earned its place in pop culture - will be the ones to suffer most as they wonder whether Saunders, who wrote this rot, bothered to research the appeal behind her own show.
The series was capped by a series of specials that did a good job sending Absolutely Fabulous into the pantheon of honourable sitcoms. They should have left it at that. To borrow Patsy's turn-of-phrase, the film sucks, Sweetie.
Bland baddies: the not so super crew from the forgettable so-so superhero flick Suicide Squad.
SUICIDE SQUAD ** (123 minutes) M
The monotony and lack of style in this prolonged shoot-em-up surely serves as a symptom of our collective super-hero movie fatigue.
A group of badass super heroes - or semi-super heroes, as some don't sport any powers apart from the ability to sneer - are recruited Dirty Dozen-style to fight the Joker.
The sight of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn dolled up in her sexy anime-inspired outfit offers a mildly pleasing distraction, but the so-so action, with all the requisite explosions and muzzle flash, is very same-same and the presence of former super-star Will Smith draws a blank. Didn't he say he'd move on after After Earth?
