Sex and the City 2 (2010)

Stars: Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall

Director: Michael Patrick King

Plugs: Too many to count

New York City-based relationship and sex writer Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) returns to the big screen in the sequel to Sex in the City, inspired by the hit 1990s HBO series about a group of gal pals who love fashionable shoes and navigate relationships together. This time the group leaves the Big Apple for the sands of Saudi Arabia on a luxury vacation; their problems, of course, come with them.

The four lead characters each bring their own insecurities and issues to the table: Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) feels slighted by her sexist boss; Carrie and her husband talk about giving each other space; Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is insecure about her marriage after seeing her new nanny’s bouncing boobs; and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is dealing with hot flashes. A few other things happen—such as Carrie running into an ex-lover in an Arabian souk—but for the most part it’s all piffle. There are a few fun scenes, such as a fabulous gay wedding (with a Liza Minelli cameo) but overall it’s a downer.

Carrie and the rest of the gang are getting a little long in the tooth, yet the script demands an unconvincing and tiresome naïveté from them. They must obligingly gasp and squeal with giddy teenage excitement at everything from beefy soccer players to fancy hotels. There’s plenty of fish-out-of-water scenes, such as when Charlotte falls off a camel while flailing her arms desperately trying to find a cell phone signal in the Arabian desert. If Sex and the City 2 was a sitcom, this would be when the producers would insert a laugh track to notify the audience that they should be laughing hysterically instead of sighing and looking at their watches. Speaking of time, the film runs nearly two and a half hours—far too long to sustain any real drama or interest. The original Sex and the City series worked best in short installments with (occasionally) smart dialogue; Sex and the City 2 feels both drawn-out and dumbed-down.

On my way out of the theater, I heard a woman respond to her male friend’s dissatisfaction with the film by saying, “Well, it’s a chick flick.” She seemed to be making two points: 1) that of course a man wouldn’t like the film, since its target audience is women; and 2) that its status as a “chick flick” somehow excused its lameness. I find these arguments to be both unconvincing and vaguely insulting: don’t women like, want, and deserve to have intelligent, well-written films? Does the fact that a film’s audience is primarily women somehow give it license to suck? I don’t buy it, and neither should you.