I will be the first to admit, I loved the first Sex and the City movie. Superior costumes, great plot, good acting, passable direction and writing. I’ll also be the first to admit that I’ve been waiting two years for the sequel, and now I’m just disappointed.
For those of you living on another planet (caves probably have satellite reception these days), Sex and the City follows the lives of four New York City socialites and their intricate, often shallow, exploits. We meet the characters again two years after the first film; the audience is thrust into a same-sex marriage in Connecticut. The nuptials reminded me of a Tim Burton adaptation of the Lawrence Welk Show, but then I remembered that this was real life…kind of. There are swans, a male choir, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Liza Minnelli weds the couples and follows with a performance of “Single Ladies,” which was almost surely a harbinger of Sodom and Gomorrah. Appropriately, two Sodomites were being wed.
Back in NYC, the girls gripe and moan about their middle aged lives. Carrie tries to motivate Big to return to his old self (the one that went out on the town), Samantha is combatting menopause with a cocktail regimen of hormones so she can maintain her slutty lifestyle, Miranda complains about her new boss not liking her, and Charlotte, stressed about her children, becomes jealous over her nanny (the gorgeous Alice Eve). At 22, I questioned why the audience would sympathize with four (upper) middle-aged women who deal with very common problems in a very uncommon, superfluous, and STUPID way.
Somehow, the film travels to Abu Dahbi where Samantha is doing business with a hotel exec. Instead of getting business done, the girls have an unexplainable (6 days) of free time to don their Gucci, Valentino, and Dior around the conservative fashion of Islamic women and the emirate. The interactions between the four girls and Islamic culture was disturbing in general.
The film often walks a fine line between smut and cinema. While there is never full frontal, tons of cleavage and bulges appear at the most unnecessary times. Soccer players, in town for the World Cup try outs, often take their shirts off at the shutter of a lens and wear mankinis. Samantha, hunting for man-prey the minute the plane touches down, eventually sets her sights on a european architect, Rikard (Dick) Spirt….
After an incredibly stressful scene at dinner where Dick Spirt and Samantha are fondling each other in front of a mortified Islamic couple, Samantha finds herself in jail for violating a serious crime. The hotel manager severs ties (before the business meeting) and it is time to get the hell out of Dodge (or at least a $20,000 a night hotel room). Upon trying to escape, Samantha further upsets a mob and the girls seek shelter in a women’s book club where it is revealed under burkas, muslim women where Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, etc. Of course, because how else are women supposed to function? I remember when the show used to be about the “everyday-ness” of womanhood, and how relatable these girls were supposed to be. Now it’s just lost in ostentatiousness and offensive showcasing.
In the end, the dodecahedron of plot is never resolved. The characters undoubtably return to their Upper West Side apartments to refuel on cosmopolitans and watch The Real Housewives of New York (or maybe the Jersey Shore). Nobody learns anything and the movie felt as if the writers had 20 good jokes that they padded with two and a half hours of cinema. I feel like I’m so far removed from the Sex and the City franchise which drew me in originally.
