Jane Horrocks

Nearly 25 years after the sitcom debuted, Edina and Patsy arrive on the big screen to continue their drunken antics, although without the usual enthusiastic laugh-track everything feels eerily muted. Thankfully, there's still a lot of fun to be had, including well-aimed jabs at celebrity culture. Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley are still hilarious in their signature roles. And it's hard to get too worried about the limp plot when every scene is packed with amusing cameo appearances.

With her PR agency fading and her money spent on expanding her home, Edina (Saunders) discovers that her credit cards are "broken" and her champagne fridge is empty. So she and her pal Patsy (Lumley) set out to make some cash. After failing to sell her memoirs, Edina sets out to woo Kate Moss as a client. But this goes spectacularly wrong when Kate ends up falling off a balcony into the Thames. Now under investigation, Eddie and Pats flee to the South of France to find Patsy's wealthy ex (Barry Humphreys). They're chased by a detective (Robert Webb), who's the boyfriend of Edina's daughter Saffron (Julia Sawalha), whose teen daughter (Indeharna Donaldson-Holness) has run off with them.

Written by Saunders, the script is very loose, bouncing around without much focus before a series of impatient, nonsensical conclusions. Basically, it's little more than a flimsy framework that includes brief scenes for series regulars (including Jane Horrock's airhead assistant, June Whitfield's dotty mum, Celia Imrie's rival PR and Kathy Burke's bulldog editor), plus a few new characters like Chris Colfer's stylist. All of these people have their moments, but never quite emerge as much more than comedy sketch figures. On the other hand, the big-screen format allows Saunders and Lumley to give Edina and Patsy a bit of surprising emotional depth amid the usual slapstick nuttiness.

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This lively holiday romp has a steady stream of sharp verbal and visual gags that hold our interest. Even when the plot stalls in the middle, it's difficult to stop chuckling at the filmmakers' deranged sense of humour.

At the North Pole, Santa (Broadbent) is a bit complacent after 70 years on the job, letting his heir-apparent son Steve (Laurie) convert Christmas Eve into a high-tech black-ops style mission executed with military precision. To Steve, missing one child is an insignificant statistic. But Steve's younger brother Arthur (McAvoy) disagrees, and teams up with his feisty Grandsanta (Nighy) to make sure the last gift is delivered the old fashioned way.

Yes, the film is a riot of clashes between tradition and progress, the wisdom of the years and youthful vigour. Fortunately, the serious themes are subverted, hilariously playing with our expectations and never turning into a nostalgic paean to the olden days. That said, this British production does feel eerily co-opted by Hollywood, from the use of the American "Santa Claus" (no one ever calls him "Father Christmas", which might have made sense of the film's odd title) to the somewhat feeble attempts to ramp up the action and suspense. Not to mention a massive wave of sentimentality at the end.

But even this is undermined by Baynham (Borat) and director Smith's script, which maintains a dry British sense of humour and gives the strong vocal cast plenty of snappy material to play with. While most of the characters are a bit unmemorable, Nighy gets the best lines: Grandsanta as an old coot full of surprises, including some terrific rude jokes and an amusingly animated hound-style old reindeer sidekick. Staunton also has some terrific dialog as the underestimated Mrs Santa.

Visually the film is brightly colourful, amusingly designed with small sight gags and continual Christmas imagery. While the characters look a little plasticky, the settings are gorgeously rendered, and the flying sleigh sequences almost make it worth seeing in 3D. The problem is that the film feels stretched out by random antics and underdeveloped plot-threads along the way that add nothing to the overall story. So we get tired of the bumbling chaos, mainly because we know exactly where it's got to end up.

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Amongst both edible entrees and feathered friends, the chicken is the idiot God...

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