Sixty really is the new forty for Patsy and Edina as they remerge from TV silence onto silver screen, extravagant as ever, champagne glass in hand and Botox in face. Unfortunately for the Absolutely Fabulous duo, though, the film shows that not everything can be face-lifted back into form. The wisdom of a younger Patsy, “One more facelift on this one and she’ll have a beard”, rings regrettably true of the not so fabulous film.

We find Edina in something of a personal bankruptcy, Patsy dismayed at Edina’s lack of “hand money” (‘cash’ to the rest of us), and Edina’s PR agency representing only Lulu and Baby Spice. When the information that Kate Moss is looking for a new PR leaks, the couple jump at the opportunity. Only instead of signing a PR agreement, Patsy has a slight mishap in approaching Kate Moss, with the model ending up in the Thames, presumed dead, and Edina and Patsy on the run to the south of France. With them they drag Saffie’s now teenage daughter, Lola, and after them comes Saffie with her new policeman boyfriend figure in tow.

In a way, the fashionista comedy is a safe bet for a summer release, not least because of its nostalgia factor. Everything that made Absolutely Fabulous, well, absolutely fabulous, on TV is there. There are plenty of brilliant cameos from Baby Spice to Jeremy Paxman, Mark Gatiss to Kate Moss, and Dame Edna to Dawn French; it’s all glitter and gloss, quite like flicking through a celebrity magazine. And of course the main comediennes do not fail to deliver: Joanna Lumley masters Patsy’s Botoxed-up stiffness in her facial expressions of omnipresent contempt and slight nausea, and Jennifer Saunders captures Edina’s ever so slightly manic presence with equally impeccable skill. The pair are a delight to watch, whatever the setting.

But, unfortunately, darling, even a classic needs more to hit the red carpet in style than just the staple features of yesteryear. This lack of substance is exactly where the film stutters, even more so than Patsy and Edina on champagne and heels. Granted, the bizarreness of the starting point – Kate Moss in the river and Patsy a sought-after criminal – is spot on, but what ensues just does not catch on. At its worst, humour is sought in worn out clichés; Patsy dressed up as a man is funny enough, but in the end it doesn’t amount to much more than the standard wearing-clothes-of-opposite-sex level of entertainment. Quite frankly, there simply isn’t enough of a plot to fill in all of the film’s 91 minutes of running time.

It’s precisely this disproportionate substance to running time ratio that causes the major glitch between the TV series and film: making the transition from TV to the silver screen always runs the risk that what works as a sub-one hour sitcom just cannot be extended into a feature-length film. For Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, it’s all there – memorable quotes, top-notch comedians, the irony going with the whole fashion institution – but there simply isn’t enough of it, and so the good bits become a rarity, filled in with fakeness. The Botox of script-writing as it were.

That said, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie manages to hit the fabulous mark in its own way: it’s silly, it’s out-of-bounds, it’ll have you laughing – a summer fling essentially. Unfortunately, hitting this level of fab doesn’t make the film as fabulous as the original. Maybe sixty isn’t the new forty, after all.