Sex and the City 2: even a $10 million clothing budget can’t save you from boring dialogue and ridiculous plot.

For the record, I didn’t need another Sex and the City movie. Hell, I didn’t need the first one.

I was completely satisfied at how the SATC series ended. While in some ways the characters were in fact caricatures of certain archetypes, the end of the series found them more fully fleshed out as people. Charlotte found happiness with hairy, uncouth but steadfast Harry and got her baby; Miranda accepted family life in Brooklyn, Samantha beat cancer, became human and let herself love Smith, and Carrie became okay with being single and then magically, Big decided she was “The One.”  (We’ll leave out the part about how Michael Patrick King became obsessed with Carrie close-ups toward the end). Which is why I thought SATC: The Movie was completely superfluous: the Big wedding drama, Steve’s cheating, Samantha back to being a whore, Charlotte’s pregnancy. Ok, there was some satisfaction in seeing Charlotte’s pure hatred at Big when he wussed out at the wedding.

SATC 2 continues this “making up trouble” tradition.

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

The girls look awful, their clothes are terrible, the plot is unrealistic (Miranda has a chauvinist boss and she doesn’t give him a mouthful? A free trip for four to luxury Abu Dhabi resort on a Sheik’s dime?), and all the things you loved about Sex and the City the series, like the great friendships between the girls, the awkward yet realistic dating situations, and the snappy, witty dialogue you’d come to know and love – all gone. Along with Big’s cute eyebrow flicks – but you can only blame that on some bad plastic surgery!  The rest, I think we can safely blame on the departure of the female writing staff. Michael Patrick King has been helming the last two films alone, and it shows. Oh, and I think the girls took the lighting and makeup staff along with them when they left because DAAYUM the girls are looking heinous. In the immortal words of my friend Eric Jesus Grimm, “Sarah Jessica Parker is looking like a genetically-engineered cross between Veronica Lake and the Crypt Keeper.”

If you’ve come expecting anything in the order of plot, character development or gorgeous clothes – in other words – anything more than a “romp;” you will be sorely disappointed. I hate to use this comparison – but it’s kind of like going to the wake of a relative who’d died, and they look so utterly unlike themselves post mortem, that you wished you’d never gone.

For a full, detailed, and spoiler-ridden review, keep reading after the jump…

SPOILER-OVERUN REVIEW!!!!! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY SPOILED!

The movie begins like the first: girls in pretty clothes meet on the street. SJP’s frighteningly fragile-looking twig legs. An entertaining flashback sequence.

At the gay wedding (Stanford and ANTHONY?!),  we’re set up with the “problems” in the movie: Miranda is a workaholic (snore), Samantha is back to being a whore cartoon of herself, except now taking anti-menopause drugs, and Charlotte is worried Harry is going to cheat with their hot braless nanny. On a marketing note, Erin Go Braless was a nice bone to throw to the boyfriends/husbands dragged to this movie by rabid SATC fans.

Then Carrie and Big retire to their decadent apartment (their nod to the poor recession victims – they “downsized” from their penthouse) and all Big wants to do is order in, watch TV, and relax on their “had to wait a year for it” couch.

Did anyone else have flashes back to Aidan in season four and “KFC and briefs” episode?

This sets us off on a “marriage itch” storyline for Carrie and Big.

We’ve never thought Carrie and Big were going to go the family route, but they always birthed snappy, sexy dialogue. But that’s gone.  And due to some scary eyelifting, so are Big’s comical eyebrow flicks.

Carrie is a big fat whiner for several scenes, then does something radical – she escapes to her old apartment for two days to write an article. To her delight, she enjoys the time apart, and at the end of two days, Big picks her up at the apartment for a surprise date. The delight doesn’t last long, as Big then proposes a “two day” every week. Now, I’m a big fan of separate spaces within a relationship, so I thought this was an amazing thing to bring up in a mainstream movie. Carrie even defends it to the girls with a “we’re free to make our own rules” speech, but secretly, even though SHE too enjoyed the results of the two-day, Carrie freaks out that Big would DARE to enjoy it as well. That sets up the inevitable “permission” for SOMETHING to happen with no-surprise-anymore Aidan meeting during the impromptu trip to Abu Dhabi with Samantha & the girls.

Along the way, Miranda quits her partnership at her law firm over a chauvinist new boss. So for the rest of the movie, Miranda plays trip planner. If this were the series (and this were true to the Miranda character), we would have seen several episodes, if not an entire season’s worth of thrash over it. Miranda’s entire identity has always been tied up with her career, and her independence. To treat it this casually was insulting.

Here’s the rest of the movie in a nutshell: Charlotte worries about Harry cheating, Miranda serves as translator and tour guide, and Samantha wants to fuck a boring Danish architect because – well, he’s there. Oh, and Carrie kisses Aidan (p.s. they missed a fantastic way to tie movie and series together by letting Carrie tell Aidan, “I married Batman.”)

After Carrie kisses Aidan, she runs back to the girls and demands they stop everything to attend to her earth-shattering problem. And it really pissed me off because she interrupted the only scene in the whole movie that felt REAL: Miranda getting Charlotte to drop her “everything’s perfect” facade and admit how her kids are making her crazy. You know what would have felt more real? Miranda (ooh, or Charlotte) yelling at Carrie and saying “SHUT THE HELL UP YOU SPINDLY-LEGGED TWAT! OTHER PEOPLE HAVE REAL PROBLEMS!”

Carrie tortures about whether to tell Big about the kiss, then finally calls him, and he coldly reacts.  I thought it was a nice turnabout: Big was once the cheater, now he was the cheatee. But a kiss is hardly the same thing as an affair.  The interesting thing about the situation was that in the moment of the kiss, Carrie loved both Aidan and Big. This is something that is never really discussed in mainstream media – the fact that it is possible to love two people at the same time. It’s as if we’re led to believe that when love for one person exists, all other love must shut off, or if it continues to exist, then the love you feel for the new person must not be REAL. Bullshit on all accounts. But, I digress.

Well, after this the inevitable then happens – Samantha, never one for propriety in any circumstance – gets arrested for kissing aforementioned Danish gentleman on a beach in the overly conservative country. I could get into the whole “why is the woman punished and not the man” but that’s a whole other series of encyclopedias. Their host swiftly withdraws his freebies and the girls must leave town, but not before they have to return to the souk where Carrie ran into Aidan to get her passport, and Samantha, in the throes of hot flashes and having stripped to shorts and a tank top, gets surrounded by an angry mob. In a ridiculous moment, she begins taunting them with her condoms and giving them all the finger.

Then, improbably, the girls are rescued by women in burkhas, only to discover they are all wearing this year’s spring runway collections underneath. Bonding all around! Although I thought that was lame, that scene contained a pretty good slam against the middle east culture, as one woman said, “that (the Samantha incident) will keep the men riled up for for weeks, some maybe for years!” As if they delight in how ridiculously puritanical the men are. But even though I enjoyed the idea, I have to wonder if that’s really the attitude. In a culture where the victims of rape are routinely stoned, this can’t be the prevailing attitude.

The girls all return to the states, Miranda gets a job with a non-profit, Charlotte’s worries are unfounded, Big forgives Carrie (with an improbable, “I’m a grownup” speech) and everyone lives happily ever after. Except the audience, wondering why they wasted their hard earned money on this drivel.

Michael Patrick King spoke after the premiere I saw.  I could tell he feared bad reviews, was already just referring to the movie in terms of “fun” and even addressed the $10M clothing budget (“so what?”), but he crossed the line when he stood up for the scene of Samantha surrounded by irate men – he said “she was attacking THEM.” Only a man with no concept of a woman’s fear of violence could make such a comment. And in that country, a woman in that position could be stoned to death. Certainly nothing to joke about. Unless you’re Monty Python

The one question I wanted to ask him? “Don’t you think the $10 million would have been better spent on a good script?”

Tags: "sex and the city" movie

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Humor. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.