Movie Review: The Fat Slags by shoutingatco.ws

Fat Slags is an ill-conceived spin off of the original Viz cartoon. Written by someone who has no interest in the characters, plotlines or comedy, the paltry 72 minute running time is actually far too long. Fiona Allen plays the Sandra half of the slags, while Sophie Thompson is Tracey, but they’re so generic and basically the same character that it wouldn’t matter if they swapped half-way through, for a laugh.
The most staggering thing about the movie is the number of otherwise decent actors and/or recognisable faces that they’ve roped in: Dolph Lundgren, Geri Halliwell, Anthony Head and Beppe from EastEnders all make appearances.

The Fat Slags fire up their Contrivance-O-Meter, and are luckily invited from their home (“69 Shit Street, Fulchester” – and that’s one of the best jokes in the film) down to London, to appear on a breakfast telly show about nutrition.

Rich business-dick Sean Cooley, played by Jerry O’Connell – like nearly everyone else involved in this film, he’s far too good for it – gets to be all businessy and dicky in his limo: He rejects a date with Britney Spears, calls the Dalai Lama a cocksucker and somehow has a plant-pot fall on his head. The accident turns him into a stupid, and sets up the rest of the film.

In a business meeting, Cooley accidentally turns the TV to a Jeremy-Kyle-esque chat show and spots the Fat Slags engaging in a “vicious assault” on the rest of the audience. Because writing consequences is a pain in the arse, they just run out of the studio and everything is fine. Cooley meets up with the girls, and is determined to make them stars in all the usual fields: Fashion, music, art and, er, politics. Okay.
First up is fashion, where James Dreyfus’ abysmally camp designer Fidor is blackmailed into giving them a starring role in his London Fashion Week show with four days’ notice.

Cue an HYSTERICAL montage, in which one of the slags falls off the end of the stage, the other breaks it and OH GOD MAKE IT STOP. And if that wasn’t painful enough, the Fashion Week is shown in almost its entirety: the slags catwalking and costume changing and catwalking and costume changing and catwalking and costume changing and then they flash their tits. The room goes silent and then… rapturous applause! Everyone loves them! Woohoo! Yay!

To save the bother of writing or filming some more scenes, their meteoric rise to the top is shown in a handful of The Sun headlines. The North is brilliant! Being fat is great! Also they have released a single and it’s at number one!

There’s a brief Pretty Woman moment here – earlier in the film, they went to A Swanky Boutique, and were patronised by shop assistant Naomi Campbell for being too fat. Normally, they’d leave in floods of tears and come back later to get their revenge. Not here: The first time in, one of them, it doesn’t matter which, punches Naomi in the face. There’s no consequences, so they’ve already won.This means that when they do go back into the store as fashion icons, they’ve got nothing to prove, no reason to get one over on Campbell. Like everything else, it all falls flat.

Tracey is invited on a date by Cooley. Sandra is listening in on the phone, and is so shocked by what she hears that she falls down backwards and squashes the dog. Panicking, she Frisbees it out of the window, where it hits a gardener in the face. He falls backwards, farts, and blows up the contents of his wheelbarrow. Not sure. Really not sure.

On the date, Cooley and Tracey go to the Turner Prize award ceremony. The finalists are a bed, half a dog and the Fat Slags’ kitchen. That’s right: As a surprise, Cooley has broken into their house while they were away, dismantled their kitchen and had it shipped down to London, where it was painstakingly rebuilt, brick-by-brick and entered into the competition. Bollocks was it, mate. It wins though.

Tracey punches Sandra (who gatecrashed), and heads off with Cooley into his limo. In the next scene, I’ll leave you just with the notes I wrote: They eat a kebab. She blows him. Car crash. Nuns staring. Bites his dick off?

You know how sometimes, repetition will be funny, then annoying, and then very funny? The scene where the slags punch each other over and over again is completely the opposite of that. It’s less funny than actually being punched in the face.

Inexplicably, they wind up having to give a press conference with Kofi Annan, but instead keep punching each other. Kofi winds up falling through a table, and the slags get arrested. Cooley, from his hospital bed, is about to propose to Tracey, but is knocked out by a piece of low-flying medical equipment. Oh yeah, the slags are imprisoned in the Tower Of London now.

The accident has turned Cooley back to normal and, realising what horrors the slags are, he invokes the clause in their contract that entitles him to everything they own. Fuck knows why a billionaire would insist on that clause, when the slags clearly don’t have a pot to piss in.

Another tabloid montage shows the decline of the slags, as their album tanks. One of them, I dunno, Tracey, shags the prison guard, and they’re granted immediate parole, which is convenient.

A horrible Mission Impossible knock-off ensues, with them stealing Cooley’s laptop, while suspended from a mechanism in an air vent. Running away with the laptop, they get the bus home. On the bus, they try to hack into the laptop. Thankfully, we’re spared the twenty minutes they spend trying futilely to connect to the on-bus WIFI. The laptop alarm goes off, as they do, so they throw it out of the window. This causes the limo chasing them – containing Cooley and his stooges, Anthony Head and Geri Halliwell – to blow up. With no consequences.

Back at home, the slags drink lager and their boyfriends turn up in another limo. Oh yeah, the boyfriends were repatriated to Afghanistan because a policeman, and then immigration, couldn’t understand their Geordie accents. The end.

If you want 72 unfunny minutes in which vaguely talented actors dress up in stupid fat suits and say and do stupid things, then this is definitely the film for you. In reality though, it’s like seeing a confused, sobbing middle-aged man in a suit slowly wetting himself. Upsetting, embarrassing and no fun for anybody.

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