Sex and The City 2 Film Review

Sex and the City 2 comes to Indian theatres after having earned the dubious distinction of being the worst reviewed film in recent history. Critics across the US and the UK have lambasted it for being tone-deaf, vacuous and ridiculously-over-the-top.

I walked into the theater with the kind of perverse fascination that you reserve for a train-wreck, thinking: how bad can this be. Well, the reviews weren’t exaggerated. This film is just plain awful.

Or to paraphrase a line from American critic Roger Ebert: This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

Sex and the City 2 reprises the adventures of the four New York fashionistas who have beguiled the world since the television series started in 1998. Only now they are battling mid-life problems.

So Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker who has also co-produced the film, is trying to put sparkle into her two-year-old marriage. She’s afraid that she and her husband will grow into a boring, old married couple - the type who watch television in bed.

Miranda, played by Cynthia Nixon, is struggling with a nasty boss. Samantha, played by Kim Cattrall, is desperately fighting menopause with tablets and creams. And Charlotte, played by Kristin Davis, is trying to cope with the traumas of motherhood.

So when Samantha gets an all-expenses paid trip to Abu Dhabi, all four jump at it. What follows is a spectacularly aimless and obscenely extravagant adventure that helps the women come to terms with their various issues.

At its best, Sex and the City was a superbly entertaining female fantasy. The four friends never worked too hard but were always immaculately dressed. Yet their fierce bonding rooted the fairy tale in heart-felt emotion.

Sadly, that’s almost completely missing here. Except for one scene that rings perfectly true: Miranda and Charlotte discuss how hard being a mother is and Charlotte admits that when she thought her husband might have an affair with their young nanny, her first thought was: I can’t lose the nanny.

But the rest of this two and a half hour saga lurches from one random scene to the next without even attempting coherence.

Samantha gets arrested on the beach for having sex; Carrie runs into an old boyfriend and kisses him; Charlotte falls off a camel. And they do all this while changing a ridiculous number of outfits and wearing high heels on sand.

This film reportedly had a 10 million dollar costume budget. Of course the Abu Dhabi adventure brims over with cultural stereotypes but this entire film is so infantile that you can’t even seriously take offense.

Director Michael Patrick King who wrote the screenplay, attempts to make some statement about female solidarity and freedom but the writing is feeble and foolish.

Sex and the City 2 is unforgivably boring but what’s sadder is, that King has made these women, who were once so enjoyable, into caricatures of themselves. They all seem desperate, empty and in places, downright ugly. At one point, Carrie asks her husband: Am I just a bitch wife who nags you? You almost want to scream out aloud: Yes.

Sex and the City 2 is excruciating cinema. I recommend that you steer clear.