Joanna Lumley as "Patsy" and Jennifer Saunders as "Edina." Credit: Photo by David Appleby. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie

Opens in local theaters Friday, July 22.

Let's make the big confession upfront: As of one week ago, I had never seen an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, the 1990s BBC series that's now been given the big-screen treatment in director Mandie Fletcher's new Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.

It isn't that I intentionally avoided the show, per se. It's just that when it comes to British humor, I tend to like mine dry, like a fine martini, rather than bubbly, like the bottles of Bollinger ("bolly") that protagonists Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) and Edina "Eddy" Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders, who also wrote the script) down by the caseload.

But never let it be said that your intrepid correspondent comes unprepared. I put out the call to AbFab fanatics for a list of the show's best episodes and managed to binge about a half-dozen or so before attending the packed screening at Tampa's Muvico Centro Ybor 20.

In retrospect, this may have been a mistake. Judged by the yardstick of the best work this ensemble did in its prime — also returning for the film are Eddy's sensible mother (June Whitfield), her prudish daughter (Julia Sawalha) and her space-cadet personal assistant, Bubble (Jane Horrocks) — AbFab: The Movie simply doesn't measure up.

In part, this stems from the inherent challenge of trying to stretch what works well in half-hour sketches to fit a feature length. By taking the richly drawn, boozy cartoon characters that are Saunders' spendthrift public-relations maven and Lumley's chain-smoking fashion magazine editor out of the comfortable confines of Eddy's basement kitchen and dropping them off in the real world, AbFab: The Movie sets a tone not unlike the juxtaposition of Toons and live action in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

That's not an inherently bad thing. Saunders, in particular, is a brilliant physical comedian and her rubber face and pratfalls carry a riotously funny first 20 minutes. But the setup hits something of a wall once the mechanics of plot come into play. The final hour also trudges through some pretty dark emotional territory, punctuated by umpteen celebrity cameos (Chris Colfer! Jon Hamm! Joan Collins! Rebel Wilson! Jean-Paul Gaultier! Many others, particularly from the worlds of fashion and British tabloids, whose names I am presumably supposed to know because they are listed in the credits only as "herself" or "himself!").

Lulu as herself, Gwendoline Christie as herself, Jennifer Saunders as “Edina,” Abbey Clancy, Joanna Lumley as “Patsy,” Sadie Frost as herself, and Tinie Tempah as himself. Credit: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
The plot, such as it is, sees Eddy banking on a major payday from the sale of her memoirs, only to be told by a publishing agent that her life story isn't actually all that interesting. It "may have been worth living,"  he notes, "but it isn't worth reading." Shortly thereafter, a chance to revive her public-relations career by snagging Kate Moss as a client goes catastrophically wrong, in ways that force both Eddy and Patsy to go on the lam to the south of France, wanted as suspects in not one, but two potential murders (no, none of that makes much more sense even as you're watching it unspool).

What Eddy and Patsy find in Cannes, rather than the luxury and glamor they crave, is a dystopian scene in which pathetic (but wealthy) old men party with bikini-clad 20-year-olds, while their age-appropriate female contemporaries (among whom number Patsy and Eddy themselves, much to their chagrin) are shunted aside into a parlor room that may as well be a parallel universe.

So much of the humor of the original AbFab was mined from how shamelessly its central characters flouted the niceties of social convention, but AbFab: The Movie flips that script, asking its audience to feel sympathy for a pair of longtime wanton sociopaths who wake up one day to find themselves "fat and old and hated by everyone."

That's a tough hurdle. For devoted fans, the film just might clear the bar, but not without some bumps and bruises that'll hurt like hell in the morning.

This article appears in Jul 21-28, 2016.