Sex and the City 2

What has happened to my beloved TV characters? They were once so smart, tart and sexy. They proved that women could be all of these things at any age. When the series started they were already in their thirties, which was well past the sell-by date on most other television shows. Unless they were about smart-but-excessively-neurotic lawyers, doctors or other high-powered professionals, and then they often had ONE love interest that they dragged out a will-they-won’t-they past any reasonable amount of time to come to a conclusion. Sex and the City was bold and daring television – it enticed you with frank, often hilarious, discussions of sex, scenes of pure raunch, but kept you watching because of the way that it portrayed female friendship and relationships. Which leads me to ask, once again, what has happened to my beloved TV characters and who has replaced them?

It should be noted that there are four great things about this movie, and they are all as superficial as things could possibly be in film criticism. Here is my list:

1. Max Ryan, who plays Samantha’s love interest, is impossibly attractive. His nude scene (however brief) is a highlight.
2. The Australian soccer team that takes a brief detour into the pool is filmed in such a soft-core porno fashion that it’s almost impossible not to ogle and drool along with the girls.
3. Model-cum-actor Noah Mills shows up briefly, utters very few lines of dialogue and shows off the goods. His nude scene is another highlight.
4. The best part of the entire film is seeing Liza Minnelli officiate a gay wedding and then perform “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” You read that sentence correctly. It is an unhealthy mixture of cringe-inducing awkward and camp-tastic awesome. Someone should tell Liza (with a Z) that while she was once one of the greatest musical performers of all-time, years of booze, marriages and drugs have taken their toll on her voice and overall demeanor.

The rest of the film is two and a half hours of promising topics, but turgid and ludicrous scripting and practically no development. These girls who New York girls (despite being mostly transplants) to their core, they lived and breathed the city life and were in-tune with its heartbeat. To see them outside was always a debatable and questionable episode. The film’s choice of transplanting them to Abu Dhabi isn’t just questionable, it’s downright offensive. Not because they are going to the Middle East, but you know exactly where the story points will take us and you prepare for the ham-fisted approach. We are given architecture porn at Abu Dhabi and little else. Aside from borderline-racist depictions of Muslim men and don’t get me started on the waifer-thin (and possibly offensive) thought that women practically have a group cum-shot over our NY girls pissing off the men-folk. They also strip to reveal this past season’s latest fashion offerings in a scene so ridiculous you have to chuckle, at least a tiny bit.

But these Looney Tunes-level antics are just one big problem in a movie seemingly built out of big problems. The characters themselves bare the faintest resemblance to their TV counterparts. Remember Miranda the sarcastic, tough but secretly vulnerable high-powered attorney? There’s one scene in the film where a real Miranda moment occurs outside of her relationship with the girls. Miranda quits her job (fans of the show are thinking: “What? She would never!” I know, bear with me), and makes it to Brady’s school to see that he has won a science fair competition. She naturally chokes up and is elated to know that she ‘made it.’ Once she got pregnant with Brady, Miranda’s character, who always felt the closest to a real person, was torn between her duties at work, wanting to have a social life and being a mother. She struggled with that balance. That one scene was her only moment in character. Other than that she is happy-go-lucky, uber-perky tour guide. Who is this woman? And Charlotte, the most traditional and conservative of the group, has descended into a hysterical cartoon version of herself at an alarming rate. It slowly started towards the end of the last season, escalated throughout the first so-so film, and is now completed. Samantha has a menopausal storyline, I know TV show fans, I thought we already covered that with her breast cancer treatments kicking her into early-menopause, but apparently not. The less said about it the better. And Carrie and Big are given drama that is obvious and like trying to get blood from a stone. Her arguments about becoming domesticated are real, honest and feel like a totally vulnerable conversation. How it plays out is annoying. Who knew Mr. Big was a stay-at-home kind of guy? And guess which two gays are getting married! That’s right, Stanford and Anthony. Why? Because they’re the only two gay reoccurring characters from the show. That’s why. This film is a disservice and insult to the fans who helped make the show and the first film such a success. Sex and the City 2 hasn’t fared as well as the box office for this reason and this reason alone. It is an established property that is, essentially, critic-proof. But when you disenfranchise the fans, then you are killing your franchise.

There is ONE other scene which feels like a real moment from the show. We watched the show for the outrageous, sometimes garish, fashion, the frank sex talk and raunchy comedy and explicit scenes, but we stayed for the empowering images of female friendship and women in the work force doing something that they loved. Carrie is barely glimpsed writing, Samantha barely does anything PR related and Miranda is barely glimpsed in the office. But there is a scene between Miranda and Charlotte that feels so note-perfect you wonder what happened with every other scene between them. They share the horror stories, stresses and emotional distresses of raising children. Every time one of them shares, they have a drink. It’s funny, it’s painfully honest and numerous people can connect with the experiences and stories that they are saying. That was the magic of the show. This movie has a lot of sparkle and flash, but no heart and definitely no magic.