SEX AND THE CITY 2 (2010)

DIRECTOR: Michael Patrick King

STARRING: Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon

First and foremost let me say that I am a fan of the original show. I’ve enjoyed it in its entirety, so I have earned any shots that I take at this movie. I’ll admit that going into this I knew it would be bad, considering the mess the first one was, but I didn’t know how many shades of bad it would be. While it wasn’t quite as frustrating as the first one, this was just a little more pointless, a little more ridiculous, and — believe it or not — a lot more offensive.

In Sex and the City 2, two years have gone by since Carrie (Parker) married Big, the love of her life. She is already finding herself sinking into a sparkle-free marriage funk, lamenting over what she perceives as monotony. In Carrie-world, this spells doom. Meanwhile, Charlotte (Davis) is dealing with the stressful realities of raising two young daughters; Miranda (Nixon) is having trouble balancing her job and family life; and good ole’ Samantha (Cattrall) is battling off menopause. Clearly, the girls need a getaway. Where better to go than the “New” Middle East?

As you may have been able to guess by now, there is little to no plot to speak of here. This movie is essentially an excuse to relocate the girls to a “fabulous” new location and see what shenanigans they can get into. The miracle is the fact that they manage to stretch it out over a two and a half hour running time. Theoretically that should be comparable to spending a fun afternoon watching episodes of the show, but it’s much less tolerable. In the show, everything is quick, quick, quick — there are no shots of the girls walking down the sidewalk just to showcase their outfits, and the scenes are smart enough to follow a common thread. In the movie, on the other hand, the only priority is how many designer labels they can pack into two hours.

This brings me to another problem. What made the show so enjoyable was the fact that it was so easy to relate to the characters: “You’re such a Miranda!” “I do that sometimes, too!” Each of them is unique and, in a way, they each represent a different facet of modern femininity. The tragedy about the movies is that the characters have become completely glossed over. I can’t help but wonder (ooh, a Carrie-ism!) if the director thought that because they would be on a larger screen they had to become larger characters, therefore transforming them into cartoonish versions of themselves. Charlotte won’t stop shrieking with glee, Samantha has to crack a lame joke in every scene she’s in — even Big has become an annoying exaggeration of himself! Need I go on? I swear I wanted to throttle every one of them.

Now for my biggest gripe. I didn’t know it was possible to be genuinely offended by a movie like this, but as it turns out, it is. As the movie struggled to try to carry on the show’s original pseudo-feminist edge (which, I admit, was groundbreaking at the time), it seemed to forget that there is a world outside of NYC and, yes, America. And, the fact of the matter is, most of that outside world dislikes us. Watch this movie and you’ll see a pretty decent reason why. It astounds me that a film that should be so innocent could be so culturally disrespectful. I won’t go into any details so as not to spoil you viewers, but it involves Samantha in the middle of a crowd of Arab men — not to mention, the frequent mentions of the burqa, which was so unbelievably ethnocentric that eventually I just had to tune it out. (That doesn’t mean I’m pro-burqa, I’m just pro-sensitivity.) The underlying message they were going for, of course, was that all women are essentially the same — part of one big international sisterhood. That’s nice, but not when what comes across is that all women are the same as women here, even under those oppressive burqas.

I probably don’t need to outright say that this sucked. It did. If you’re a fan of the show you still might enjoy it, but not if you’re a recently converted feminist and an admirer of, you know, good films.

FINAL GRADE: C-