Movie Reviews  |  R  |  View Trailer  |  May 27, 2010

Sex And The City 2 is my first bout with the Sex And The City series. After watching 45 minutes of the film, I leaned over to Steve Salles (film critic for the Ogden Examiner and Doug Wright’s Movie Show) and asked, “Does anything ever happen in this show?” His response was the perfect summary for the film. “They change their clothes, eat and drink. That’s it.” 

Sex And The City opens with its four central characters - Carrie (the high-strung whiny author), Miranda (the powerful, “women’s-rights” ginger lady), Charlotte (the common sense-less stay at home bimbo mom) and Samantha (the ragingly vulgar whore) – going to a gay friend’s gay wedding. After 25 minutes of painfully repetitious gay jokes, the story then turns to Carrie having problems with her new husband. Except her “problems” are not close to anything like the problems we “real people” have in our relationships – so we not only never connect with the characters issues, we look at Carrie as being the one at fault. Carrie freaks out on her husband because after a long day working on Wall Street all he wants to do is order-in and stay at home with his wife. Carrie wants to make reservations in ritzy restaurants, dress-up in absurd fashion and act like she is thirty years younger than she really is. Because this story focuses on vain high-society glamour seekers, there is absolutely no real connection between them and the average audience that will see this movie. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a million women who WILL see and connect with it. 

You see, there are two types of women who watch and enjoy Sex And The City: there are the educated women who enjoy it for the writing and how it captures the “free woman” spirit, and then there are those who hoot and holler about how much they love it for the clothes, the fashion and the coveted lifestyle. The latter are the fans that will go out wearing slutty clothes that they are far too old to be wearing. Those are the annoying ones. The ones you will see opening weekend flocking around in trashy herds, only stopping to throw back a martini like their big-screen friends do. 

If you are a straight man, good luck making it through this one. A 24-hour marathon riding of “It’s A Small World” would be a faster flowing and less painful torture session than the two-and-a-half hour Sex And The City sequel. If all women were like the women of Sex And The City, the world would be filled with gay men. 

But it is not only the pretentiousness of this story-less movie that makes it absolutely dreadful; it is also the offensive nature of everything these women do. I am not just referring to the vulgarity of it, but the morally offensive things the characters do. 

In the second half of the movie, the ladies take an all-expenses-paid-for trip to the Middle East. While there, they basically take a dump on every cultural or religious belief. It is no wonder why the Middle East hates the United States so much! I am certain that terrorists will use this movie as a recruitment tool. It captures everything bad in the U.S. society and how culturally arrogant we can be. For those who saw Remember Me, the things they do in Sex And The City 2 are just as offensive as Remember Me’s bastardizing ending. 

I am guessing that those who enjoy Sex And The City for its writing are going to be sorely disappointed in the sequel. In the end, when the whole movie is in shambles, it feels more like an old, racist episode of The Three Stooges than it does an intelligent adult comedy. Though this may be movie about high-society, nothing is nothing classy about it. It is low brow and tasteless. 

Photo credit: New Line Cinema